SIDETRACKED: HENNING MANKELL

Kurt Wallender is at it again, tracking down a serial killer, this time a psycho who disposes of his victims with a hatchet, scalps them, then buries the scalps outside a hospital window.  Wallender is first summoned to an open field, where a farmer has observed a young black girl walking in circles.  When he approaches her, she pours gasoline over herself and immolates her body, to Wallander's horror.  This is the beginning, a clue to the later murders, however obscure at this point.  The next two victims are a magistrate and a wealthy though seedy entrepreneur.  Both are hatcheted and scalped and Wallender sees little if any connection, especially when the third victim, Bjorn Fredman, a small time crook, with a long record of abuse, familial and otherwise.  Wallender visits the family, sees they are obviously victims of abuse, and one of the daughters has been in a mental hospital for three years, though Wallender cannot find out why.  Slowly, the death of the young girl by immolation, the Fredman daughter in the mental hospital connect to the tastes of the first two victims for young girls.  It becomes clearer that there is a white slave operation in Sweden, two of the victims, abusers of those girls.  Through one clue after another and his intuition, Wallender realizes, with the help of a psychiatrist, that these murders are a type of revenge for what was done to these girls, to the Fredman girl in particular.  But why was her father killed as well.  Ah, realizes Wallender, he's abused not only his own daughter, but son as well, which leads Wallender to the realization that it's Fredman's 14 year old son who is the serial killer, avenging what has been done to his sister, thinking by doing it, he will free her of her demons. Too late, however, as Stefan or Hoover as he calls himself, fleeing from the police on his moped, with sister on his back, slams into a tree killing her.  Thus ends Wallender's long journey, just in time to go on a planned vacation with Biiba, the lady friend he met in his first novel, from Latvia.  The novel ends with him going off to Italy with his father, suffering from Alzheimers, his last request.  Family often intrudes into the life of policing, creating another strand to the world of Kurt Wallender.