I don’t care how famous the author or how many socialists are backing him up; if I see holes in a book, I’ll mention them. Thus, when it comes to The Man from Beijing, the emperor has no clothes; in other words, this book has one really bad construction.

The wolf bit, in the beginning, I can take it as a metaphor, but the rest of the book doesn’t live up to that imaginative metaphoric beginning at all.

The beginning that comes after this I can be all right with, where 19 people were discovered brutally murdered in Hesjövallen in northern Sweden, despite the fact that the descriptions of the murders were unnecessarily gruesome.

The involvement of the judge Birgitta Roslin in itself is an iffy bit. For one thing, she lives elsewhere, in Helsingborg. Second, she has never met the foster family who raised one of her parents many years ago, before she was born. Moreover, she is a judge with a job to go to and a marriage with serious problems. Yet, she pokes around to make things more complicated for Vivi Sundberg, the officer on duty for the crimes.

Plus, there is another story that showed how the Chinese workers and immigrants were mistreated while they were building railroads in the Western United States during the nineteenth century. Now, the intent behind the present murders isn’t very clear if one of their descendants were out to get revenge or what.

Then, while the Hesjövallen murders are being investigated, Birgitta goes on a trip to China for a reason even she can’t explain to herself as she somehow has figured out a Chinese connection because she has found a diary of her mother and a red silk ribbon from a Chinese restaurant, a replica of which was near one of the murders.

Then, there is the section on China’s Maoist history, so long and so disconnected to the main story that I thought somehow the printers made a mistake and inserted a historical book in the middle of this book.

The story also branches out to Zimbabwe and Nevada while Birgitta finds a friend in Hong Qui of Beijing.

At the end, the intrigue in the story, the solving of the murders, and many other elements of the plot all go unexplained.

The story, in general, is so scattered and so terribly constructed that even the good parts of it have been contaminated with redundancy and senselessness.

In short, I think the author’s personal feelings and criticism of the free world, opposed to his socialistic values touching on communism, have worked against the better of his craft and has made him mess up a possibly good murder-mystery story.

the construction and all other plot elements.

never read anything by this author.

I wasted my time.

Henning Mankell is the acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries plus more than 20 other novels.

it made me mad at myself that I even finished reading it. Yes, there is a signaling of a plot in the beginning, but the entire thing is so disconnected that one wonders where this author learned his craft.

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Created Sep 18, 2018 at 6:31pm • Submit your own review...