Mr. Mankell is that unusual thing: a European thriller writer whose work holds up as literature and who has broken out as an international phenomenon. He is best known for his eight novels and a book of short stories featuring the gloomy, introspective and crotchety Inspector Kurt Wallander of the Ystad police force. These have sold some 20 million copies worldwide. (In the United States they are published by the New Press.) Mr. Mankell has also written plays, novels and nonfiction set in Africa, where he spends about half his time.

But it is the Wallander novels that have secured his reputation and through which he has emerged as the natural heir to the great Swedish crime novelists Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. "Apart from his uncommon skill at devising dense, multilayered plots, Mankell's forte is matching mood to setting and subject," Marilyn Stasio wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "Whether it's a magisterial storm at sea or the `gray mud, gray trees, gray sky' of a barren town in the dead of winter, the bleak imagery in these books is both a reflection of Wallander's state of mind and a comment on the greater darkness that he senses creeping over his country and his world."