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Zusatztext “Exquisite. . . . Something to look forward to.” - — Los Angeles Times Book Review “A scary and cunning tale. . . . Here is a police procedural in which the main procedure is thought.” — Rocky Mountain News “Achieves a deeply satisfying density of plot and characterization.” — The Baltimore Sun “A marvelously told mystery. . . . You can't put it down! but you won't want to finish it either.” — Austin American Statesman Informationen zum Autor Henning Mankell is the internatinally acclaimed, bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander novels. Mankell's novels have been translated into forty-five languages and have sold more than forty million copies worldwide. He was the first winner of the Ripper Award and also received the Glass Key and the Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger, among other awards. His Kurt Wallander mysteries have been adapted into a PBS television series starring Kenneth Branagh. During his life, Mankell divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where he was artistic director of the Teatro Avenida in Maputo. He died in 2015. Klappentext The mystery thriller series that inspired the Netflix crime drama Young Wallander. From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the fifth riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series. In an African convent, four nuns and a unidentified fifth woman are brutally murdered--the death of the unknown woman covered up by the local police. A year later in Sweden, Inspector Kurt Wallander is baffled and appalled by two murders. Holger Eriksson, a retired car dealer and bird watcher, is impaled on sharpened bamboo poles in a ditch behind his secluded home, and the body of a missing florist is discovered--strangled and tied to a tree. The only clues Wallander has to go on are a skull, a diary, and a photo of three men. What ensues is a case that will test Wallander's strength and patience, because in order to discover the reason behind these murders, he will also need to uncover the elusive connection between these deaths and the earlier unsolved murder in Africa of the fifth woman.Chapter 1 Just after 10 p.m. he finally finished. The last stanzas had been difficult to write; they took him a long time. He had wanted to achieve a melancholy, yet beautiful expression. Several attempts were consigned to the wastepaper basket. Twice he'd been close to giving up altogether, but now the poem lay before him on the table--his lament for the middle spotted woodpecker, which had almost disappeared from Sweden. It hadn't been seen in the country since the early 1980s--one more species soon to be wiped out by humankind. He got up from his desk and stretched. With every passing year, it was harder and harder to sit bent over his writings for hours on end. An old man shouldn't be writing poems, he thought. When you're 78 years old, your thoughts are of little use to anyone. But at the same time, he knew this was wrong. It was only in the Western world that old people were viewed with indulgence or contemptuous sympathy. In other cultures, age was respected as the period of enlightened wisdom. He would go on writing poems as long as he could lift a pen and his mind was clear. He was not capable of much else. A long time ago he had been a car dealer, the most successful in the region. He was known as a tough negotiator. He had certainly sold a lot of cars. During the good years he had owned branches in Tomelilla and Sjöbo. He had made a fortune large enough to allow him to live in some style. But it was his poetry that really mattered to him. The verses lying on the table gave him a rare satisfaction. He drew the curtains across the picture windows that faced the fields rolling down towards the sea, which lay out of sight. He went over to his bookshelf. He had pub...
