Henning Mankell - "The Fifth Woman"

After another draining investigation, Kurt Wallander begins his sixth case on holiday with his elderly father in Rome. This had been planned towards the end of Sidetracked, as the two men finally began to find common ground - sadly in the face of the senior Wallander's diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. Returning from the Italian capital, Wallander almost has a new lease on life, but we all know it can't last.

Henning Mankell's The Fifth Woman (originally published in Swedish as Den femte kvinnan in 1996, translated to English in 2000) is the result of this knowledge that we as the readers have. Indeed, even before the dishevelled Wallander makes an appearance in the novel, we've been treated to an enigmatic preface dealing with a woman being killed in a remote region of North Africa and the vague sense that something less than positive is about to happen.
For Wallander, the investigation begins with a puzzling case. He and Ann-Britt Höglund are called to a florist where a break-in has occurred, but nothing was taken. Tempting as it is to write this off as a prank, both Wallander and Höglund have their doubts when they see a small pool of blood on the floor of the shop.
Wallander's curiosity is also piqued when a heating-oil deliveryman reports the disappearance of Holger Eriksson, one of his clients. The reader is already aware that something has happened to Eriksson, and it is perhaps unsurprising that this disappearance quickly escalates into a murder investigation. The body-count, also surprising nobody, climbs from there.

The legacy of the previous case seems to haunt Wallander throughout this novel. As the violence behind Eriksson's murder becomes more apparent, the locals around Ystad organise themselves into self-defence militias in response to the seeming inability of the local police to handle yet another violent killer in their midst.
In some ways, the Sweden of The Fifith Woman is a Sweden developing into the society familiar to readers of more contemporary crime fiction. Wallander at one point muses that the difference is that Swedes no longer darn their socks, and are willing to throw things away when they're no longer useful. If this can apply to socks or other consumer items, he wonders, perhaps it can also apply to human life. The short step towards Stieg Larsson's Stockholm is very apparent, particularly as we learn that the victims of the killer here can also be described as "Men who hate women".

While The Fifth Woman contains an intriguing puzzle around the killer's identity, it feels as though Mankell may have simply tried too hard here. The "Chinese box" (Wallander's words) surrounding the solution is too intricate to be opened through dogged detective work alone, and the key breakthrough is a very unconvincing series of coincidences roughly two-thirds of the way through the novel. From this point, to give Mankell his due, the plot rights itself and races towards a more convincing conclusion, but the narrative disjunct is still jarring.
Much of the early sections of the novel are taken up with Mankell's other pet interest - Africa. Outside of his successful novel-writing career, he was the founder of a theatre in Mozambique and a strong advocate for that continent. As well as the mysterious death at the outset of this novel, there's a long digression dealing with Swedish mercenaries in the Katanga conflict in the then-Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in the 1950s and 1960s. While this is interesting, the angle ultimately remains completely unresolved and feels more like Mankell demonstrating the breadth of his interests rather than writing a novel. My edition clocks in at just under 600 pages, for example, and could have lost a good 100 of them without losing any of the drama had this exposition been trimmed.

That said, Mankell makes up for his heavy-handed display of his research with some surprisingly touching scenes dealing with Wallander's family. His relationship with his father seems to have finally stabilised, only to be cut cruelly short during this investigation (this isn't a spoiler), and his daughter Linda seems able to interact with him as an adult - rather than as the sort of overgrown child Wallander seems to have in his mind. In fact, it is in this novel that Linda first confesses her interest in a police career of her own.
Wallander's difficult relationship with Baiba Liepa in Riga is seemingly no closer to a resolution, either. During quieter moments in this case, he wonders if perhaps retirement from the police is the solution, in order to give the two of them a private life outside of Ystad. Somehow, this seems an unlikely outcome, particularly given Wallander's previous flirtation with retirement in The Man Who Smiled.

The Fifth Woman is far from a bad novel. Mankell is still more heavy-handed with his plotting than one would normally expect by a veteran of six novels, but the novel works substantially more often than not, and is definitely a rewarding read. One is left - once again - wishing that Kurt Wallander would have things go his own way.

3.5 stars.