Before the Frost

By Henning Mankell and Ebba Segerberg

International bestseller: Kurt Wallander and his daughter join forces to hunt for a ritual killer in this “gripping, beautifully orchestrated” mystery (The New York Times Book Review).
 
Linda Wallander is bored. Having just graduated from the police academy, she’s waiting to start work with the Ystad police and move into her own apartment. In the meantime, she’s staying with her father and, like fathers and daughters everywhere, they are driving each other crazy. Nor will they be able to escape each other when she moves out. Her father is Inspector Kurt Wallander, a veteran of the Ystad police force, and the two of them are about to find themselves working a case that couldn’t be closer to home.
 
Linda’s childhood friend Anna has disappeared. As the investigation proceeds, she makes a few rookie mistakes that are both understandable and life-threatening. But as the case her father is working on dovetails with her own, something far more dangerous, and chillingly calculated, begins to emerge.
 
A “powerful” and “thoroughly engaging” thriller from “a master storyteller,” Before the Frost introduces an unforgettable new heroine to the acclaimed series that is the basis for the BBC television show starring Kenneth Branagh (San Francisco Chronicle).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 8, 2005
• ISBN: 9781595585578

Book preview

prologue

Jonestown, November 1978

His thoughts were like a shower of red-hot glowing needles, causing an almost unbearable pain. He tried desperately to remain calm, to think clearly. The worst thing was fear. The fear that Jim would unleash his dogs and hunt him down, like the terrified beast of prey he had become. Jim’s dogs: they were what he was most afraid of. All through that long night of November 18, when he had run until he was exhausted and taken shelter among the decomposing roots of an upturned tree, he imagined he could hear them closing in.

Jim never lets anyone escape, he thought. He seemed to be filled by an endless and divine source of love, but the man I have followed has turned out to be someone quite different. Unnoticed by us, he changed places with his shadow or with the devil, whom he was always warning us about. The devil of selfishness, who keeps us from serving God with obedience and submission. What appeared to be love turned into hate. I should have seen it earlier. Jim himself warned us about it time and time again. He gave us the truth, but not all at once. It came slowly, a creeping realization. But neither I nor anyone else wanted to hear it—the truth buried between the words. It was my own fault, because I didn’t want to see it. In his sermons and in all his teachings he didn’t just talk about the spiritual preparations we needed to undergo to ready ourselves for the Judgment Day ahead. He was also always telling us we had to be ready to die.

He interrupted his thoughts and listened. Wasn’t that the dogs barking? No, it was still only a sound inside of him, generated by his fear. He went back in his confused and terrified mind to the apocalyptic events in Jonestown. He needed to understand what had happened—Jim was their leader, shepherd, and pastor. They had followed him in the exodus from California when they could no longer stand persecution from the media and government authorities. In Guyana, they were going to realize their dreams of a life of peaceful coexistence with nature and one another in God. And at first they had experienced something very close to that. But then it changed. Could they have been as threatened here in Guyana as in California? Would they be safe anywhere? Perhaps it was only in death that they would find the kind of shelter they needed to construct the community they strove for. I have seen far in my mind, Jim said. I have seen much farther than before. The Day of Judgment is near at hand, and if we are not to perish in that terrible maelstrom we have to be ready to die. Only through physical death will we survive.

Suicide was the only answer. When Jim stood in the pulpit and mentioned it for the first time, there was nothing frightening about his words. First, parents were to give drinks laced with cyanide to their children, cyanide that Jim had stockpiled in plastic containers in a locked room at the back of his house. Then the adults would take the poison. Those who were overcome with doubt in the final moments would be assisted by Jim and his closest associates. If they ran out of poison, they had guns. Jim would make sure everyone was taken care of before he put the muzzle to his own head.

He lay under the tree, panting in the tropical heat. His ears strained to catch any sound of Jim’s dogs, those huge red-eyed monsters that had inspired fear in all of them. Jim had told them that everyone in his congregation, everyone who had chosen to follow his path and come to Guyana, had no choice but to continue on the path laid out by God. The path that James Warren Jones had decided was the right one.

It had sounded so comforting. No one else would have been able to make words like death, suicide, cyanide, and weapons sound so beautiful and soothing.

He shivered. Jim has walked around and inspected the dead, he thought. He knows I’m missing and he’s going to send the dogs after me. The thought clawed its way out of his mind: the dead. Tears began to run down his face. For the first time he took in the enormity of what had happened: Maria and the girl were dead, everyone was dead. But he did not want to believe it. Maria and he had talked about this in the small hours: Jim was no longer the same man they had once been drawn to, the one who promised them salvation and a meaningful life if they joined the People’s Temple. Maria was the one who put her finger on it: Jim’s eyes have changed. He doesn’t see us now. He looks past us and his eyes are cold, as if he wants nothing more to do with any of us.

They talked about running away together, but every morning they agreed that they couldn’t abandon the path they had chosen. Jim would become his old self again. He was suffering some kind of crisis and it would soon be over; he was stronger than all of them. And without him they would never have had this brief experience of what seemed to them like heaven on earth.

There was one memory that stood out more clearly than any other. It was from that time when the drugs, alcohol, and guilt about leaving his little daughter had brought him close to ending it all. He wanted to throw himself in front of a truck or train and then it would be over and no one would miss him. During one of those last meandering walks through town, when he was saying goodbye to all the people who didn’t care one way or another if he lived or died, he happened to pass by the People’s Temple. It was God’s plan, Jim said later. He had already decided that you would be among the chosen, one of the few to experience His mercy. He didn’t know what had made him walk up those steps and enter the building that looked nothing like a church. He still didn’t know what it was, even now as he lay among the roots of a tree waiting for Jim’s dogs to find him and tear him limb from limb.

He knew he should be making good his escape, but he did not leave his hiding place. He had abandoned one child already; he was not going to abandon another. Maria and the girl were still back there with the others.

What had really happened? They had gotten up as usual that morning and gathered outside Jim’s door. It remained closed, as it often had in the last days. They had therefore prayed without him, all 912 adults and 320 children. Then they had left for their various jobs. He would never have survived had he not been part of a team with the task of finding two runaway cows. When he said goodbye to Maria and her daughter, he had no inkling of the terror to come. It was only when he and the other men reached the far side of the ravine that he knew that something was terribly wrong.

They had stopped dead in their tracks at the first sound of gunshots and thought they heard human screams mingled with the chatter of the birds. They had looked at each other and then run back down toward the colony. He had become separated from the other men on the way back—possibly they had decided to flee rather than return. When he emerged from the shady forest and climbed the fence to the fruit orchards, everything was silent. Too silent. No one was there picking fruit. No one was to be seen. He ran toward the houses, sure that something disastrous had occurred. Jim must have come out of his house this day with hate, not love, blazing from his eyes.

He had a cramp in his side and slowly shifted position, straining not to make any noise. What conclusion had Jim come to? As he ran through the fruit orchards, he tried to do what Jim had always taught them: to put his life in God’s hands. He prayed as he ran. Please, God, let Maria and the child be safe. But God had chosen not to hear him. In his desperation he started to believe that the shots he had heard from the ravine were the sounds of God and Jim taking aim at each other.

When he came rushing onto the dusty main street of Jonestown he half expected to catch the two of them in their duel. But God was nowhere to be seen. Jim Jones was there, the dogs barked like crazy in their cages, and there were bodies everywhere. He could see at once that they were all dead. It was as if they had been struck down by a giant fist from the sky. Jim Jones and the six brothers who were his personal assistants and bodyguards must have gone around and shot children trying to crawl away from their parents’ corpses. He ran around among the dead looking for Maria and the child, but without success.

It was when he shouted Maria’s name that he heard Jim calling him. He turned around and saw his pastor cocking a pistol at him. They were about twenty meters apart, and between them, outstretched on the burned brown earth, were the bodies of his friends, contorted in their death throes. Jim pulled the trigger, but missed. Before Jim had the chance to shoot again, he ran. He heard many shots being fired and he heard Jim roar in rage, but he had not been hit and he made his stumbling way across the bodies and kept running until it was dark. He didn’t know if he was the only survivor. Where were Maria and the girl? Why was he the only one who was safe? Could one person escape the Day of Judgment? He didn’t know, he only knew it was no dream. This was all too real.

At dawn, the heat began to rise like steam from the trees. That was when he finally realized that no dogs were coming. He crawled out from under the tree, shook his aching limbs, and stood up. He started back toward the colony. He was exhausted and extremely thirsty. Everything was still very quiet. The dogs are dead, he thought. Jim must have meant it when he said no one would escape judgment. Not even the dogs. He climbed over the fence and started to run. The first bodies he saw were those who had tried to escape. They had been shot in the back.

Then he stopped by the corpse of a familiar-looking man. Shaking, he turned the body face up. It was Jim. His gaze has finally softened, he thought. And he’s looking me straight in the eyes. He had a sudden impulse to hit Jim, to kick him in the face. But he quelled this urge for violence and stood up. He was the only living soul among these dead, and he would not rest until he found Maria and the girl.

Maria had tried to run; she had fallen forward when they shot her in the back. The girl was in her arms. He bent over and cried. Now there’s nothing left for me, he thought. Jim has turned our paradise into a hell.

He stayed with them until helicopters started circling over the area. He reminded himself of something Jim had told them shortly after they first came to Guyana, when life was still good: The truth about a person can just as well be determined with the nose as with your eyes and ears, he said. The devil hides inside people and the devil smells of sulfur. Whenever you catch a whiff of sulfur, raise the cross for protection.

He didn’t know what the future held, if anything. He didn’t want to think about it. He wondered if he would ever be able to fill the void that God and Jim Jones had left behind.

PART I

the darkest hour

1

The wind picked up shortly after nine o’clock on the evening of August 21, 2001. Small waves rippled across the surface of Marebo Lake, which lay in a valley to the south of the Rommele hills. The man waiting in the shadows next to the water stretched out his hand to determine the direction of the wind. Almost due south, he thought with satisfaction. He had chosen the right spot to put out food to attract the animals he would soon be sacrificing.

He sat down on the rock where he had spread out a sweater against the chill. It was a new moon, and no light penetrated the thick layer of clouds. Dark enough for catching eels, he thought. That’s what my Swedish playmate used to say when I was growing up. The eels start their migration in August. That’s when they bump into the fishermen’s traps and wander the length of the trap. And then the trap slams shut.

His ears, always alert, picked up the sound of a car passing by some distance away. Apart from that, there was nothing. He took out a flashlight and directed the beam over the shoreline and water. He could tell that they were approaching. He spotted at least two white patches against the dark water. Soon there would be more.

He turned off the light and tested his mind—exactingly trained—by thinking of the time. Three minutes past nine, he thought. Then he lifted his arm and checked the display. Three minutes past nine—he was right, of course. In another thirty minutes it would all be over. He had learned that humans were not alone in their need for regularity. Even wild animals could be trained to respect time. It had taken him three months to prepare these animals for tonight’s sacrifice. He had proceeded with patience and deliberation. He had made himself their friend.

He turned the flashlight back on. Now there were more white patches, and they were nearing the shore. He briefly illuminated the tempting meal of broken bread crusts that he had laid out on the ground, as well as the two gasoline containers. Then he turned the light off and waited.

When the time came he did exactly as he had planned. The swans had reached the shore and were pecking at the pieces of bread he had set out for them, either oblivious of his presence or simply used to him by now. He set the flashlight aside and put on his night-vision goggles. Altogether there were six swans, three couples. Two were lying down while the rest were cleaning their feathers or still combing the ground for bread.

Now. He got up, grabbed a can in each hand, and sprayed the swans with gasoline. Before they had a chance to fly away, he emptied what remained in each of the cans and set fire to a clump of dried grass among the swans. The burning gasoline caught one swan and immediately spread to the rest. In their agony they tried to fly away over the lake, but one by one plunged into the water like fireballs. He tried to fix the sight and sound of them in his memory: both the burning, screeching birds in the air and the image of hissing, smoking wings as they crashed into the lake. Their dying screams sound like broken trumpets, he thought. That’s how I will remember them.

The whole thing was over in less than a minute. He was very pleased. It had gone according to plan, an auspicious beginning for what lay ahead.

He threw the two gasoline containers into the lake, tucked his sweater into his backpack, and shone the flashlight around the place to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind. When he was convinced he had remembered everything he took a cell phone out of his coat pocket and dialed a number. He had bought the phone in Copenhagen a few days before.

When someone answered, he asked to be connected to the police. The conversation was brief. Then he threw the phone into the lake, put on his backpack, and walked away into the night.

The wind was blowing from the east now and was growing stronger.

2

It was the end of August and Linda Caroline Wallander was wondering if she took after her father in ways she hadn’t already thought of, even though she was almost thirty years old and should know who she was by now. She had asked her father, had even tried to press him on it, but he seemed genuinely puzzled by her questions and brushed them aside by saying that she was most like her grandfather. These who-am-I-like conversations, as she called them, sometimes ended in fierce argument. They kindled quickly but also died away almost at once. She forgot about most of them and assumed that he did too.

But there had been one argument this summer that she had not been able to forget. It had been nothing, really. They had been talking about their differing memories of a holiday they took to the island of Bornholm when she was a little girl. For Linda there was more than this episode at stake; it was as if by reclaiming this memory she was on the verge of gaining access to a much larger part of her early life. She had been six, maybe seven years old, and both Mona and her father had been there. The idiotic argument had started over whether or not it had been windy that day. Her father claimed she had been seasick and thrown up all over his jacket. But Linda remembered the sea as blue and perfectly calm. They had only ever taken this one trip to Bornholm, so it couldn’t have been a matter of mixing up several trips. Her mother had never liked boat rides and her father was surprised she had agreed to this one.

That evening, after the argument, Linda had had trouble falling asleep. She was due to start working at the Ystad police station in two months. She had graduated from the police academy in Stockholm and had actually wanted to start working right away, but here she had nothing to do all summer, and her father couldn’t keep her company, since he had used up most of his vacation time in May. That was when he thought he had bought a house and would need extra time for moving. He had the house under contract; it was in Svarte, just south of the highway, right next to the sea. But then the buyer changed her mind at the last minute. Perhaps it was because she couldn’t stand entrusting her carefully tended roses and rhododendron bushes to a man who only talked about where he was going to put the kennel—when he finally bought a dog. She broke the contract, and her father’s agent suggested he ask for compensation, but he chose not to. The whole episode was already over in his mind.

He kept looking for houses that cold and windy summer, but they were all either too expensive or just not the house he had been dreaming of all those years in the apartment on Mariagatan. He kept the apartment and asked himself if he was ever really going to move. When Linda graduated from the police academy, he drove up to Stockholm and helped her move her things to Ystad. She had arranged to rent an apartment starting in September. Until then she could have her old room back.

They started getting on each other’s nerves almost immediately. Linda was impatient to start working and accused her father of not pulling strings hard enough at the station to get her a temporary position. But he said he had taken the matter up with Chief Lisa Holgersson. She would gladly have welcomed the extra manpower, but there was no room in the budget for more staff. Linda would not be able to start until the tenth of September, however much they might have wanted her to start earlier.

Linda spent the intervening time reacquainting herself with two old school friends. One day she ran into Zeba, or Zebra, as they used to call her. She had dyed her black hair red and also cut it short, so Linda had not recognized her at first. Zeba’s family came from Iran, and she and Linda had been in the same class until junior high. When they ran into each other on the street this July, Zeba was pushing a toddler in a stroller. They had stopped at a café and had coffee.

Zeba told her that she had trained as a bartender but that her pregnancy had put a stop to her work plans. The father was Marcus. Linda remembered him—the Marcus who loved exotic fruit and who had started his own plant nursery in Ystad at the age of nineteen. The relationship had ended quickly, but the child remained a fact. Zeba and Linda chatted for a long time, until the toddler started screaming so loudly and insistently that they had to leave. But they had kept in touch since that chance meeting, and Linda noticed that she felt less impatient with the hiatus in her life whenever she managed to build these bridges between her present and the past that she had known here.

As she was on her way home to Mariagatan after her meeting with Zeba, it suddenly started to rain. She took cover in a clothing store and—while she was waiting for the weather to clear up—she asked for the telephone directory and looked up Anna Westin’s number. She felt a jolt inside when she found it. She and Anna had not had any contact for ten years now. The close friendship of their childhood years had ended abruptly at seventeen when they both fell in love with the same boy. Afterward, when the feelings of infatuation were long gone, they had tried to resuscitate the friendship, but it was never the same. Linda hadn’t even thought about Anna very much for the last couple of years. But seeing Zeba again reminded her of her old friend, and she was happy to discover that Anna still lived in Ystad.

Linda called her that evening, and they met a few days later. The rest of the summer they often met several times a week, sometimes all three of them, but mostly just Anna and Linda. Anna lived on her own as well as she could on her student budget. She was studying medicine.

Linda thought Anna was even shyer now than when they were growing up. Anna’s father had left when she was only five or six years old, and he had never been heard from again. Anna’s mother lived out in the country in Löderup, not far from where Linda’s grandfather had lived and painted his favorite, unchanging motifs. Anna seemed pleased that Linda had reestablished contact with her, but Linda soon realized she had to tread carefully around her. There was something vulnerable, almost secretive about Anna, and she didn’t let Linda come too close.

Still, being with her old friends helped make Linda’s summer go by, even though she was counting the days until she was allowed to pick up her uniform from Mrs. Lundberg in the stockroom.

Her father worked constantly all summer, handling a case of bank and post office robberies in the Ystad area. From time to time Linda would hear about this case that seemed like a well-planned series of attacks. When her father fell asleep at night, Linda would often sneak a look at his notebook and the case files he brought home. But whenever she asked him about the case directly, he would avoid answering. She wasn’t a police officer yet. Her questions would have to go unanswered until September.

The days went by. One afternoon in August, her father came home and said that his real estate agent had called about a property by Mossby Beach. He wondered if she wanted to come and see it with him. She called and postponed a coffee date she had arranged with Zeba, and then her father picked her up in his Peugeot and they drove west. The sea was gray. Fall was on its way.

3

The house stood on a hill with a sweeping view of the ocean, but there was something bleak and dismal about it. The windows were boarded up, one of the drainpipes had come detached, and several roof shingles were missing. This is not a place where my father could find peace, Linda thought. Here he’ll be at the mercy of his inner demons. But what are they, anyway? She began to list the chief sources of concern in his life, ranking them in her mind: first his loneliness, then the creeping tendency to put on weight and the stiffness in his joints. What else? She put the question aside for the moment and joined her father as he inspected the outside of the house. The wind blew slowly, almost thoughtfully, in some nearby beech trees. The sea lay far below them. Linda squinted and spotted a ship on the horizon.

Kurt Wallander looked at his daughter.

You look like me when you squint like that, he said.

Only then?

They kept walking and came across the rotting remains of a leather couch behind the house. A field vole jumped out of the broken springs. Wallander looked around and shook his head.

Remind me why I want to move to the country.

"I have no idea—why do you want to move to the country?"

I’ve always dreamed of being able to roll out of bed and walk out the front door to take my morning piss, if you’ll pardon my language.

She looked at him with amusement.

Is that it?

Do I need a better reason than that? Come on, let’s go.

Let’s walk around the house one more time.

This time she looked more closely at the place, as if she were the prospective buyer and her father the agent. She sniffed around like a dog.

How much?

Four hundred thousand.

She raised her eyebrows.

That’s what it says, he said.

You don’t have that much money, do you?

No, but the bank has pre-approved my loan. I’m a trusted customer, a policeman who’s always been as good as his word. I think I’m even disappointed I don’t like this place. An abandoned house is as depressing as a lonely person.

They left. Linda read a sign on the side of the road. MOSSBY BEACH. He glanced at her.

You want to go down there?

Yes. If you have time.

This was the place where she had first told him about her decision to become a police officer. She was done with her vague plans to refinish furniture, become an actress, as well as her extensive backpacking trips all over the world. It was a long time since she had broken up with her first love, a young man from Kenya who was studying medicine in Lund. He had finally returned to his home-land and she had stayed put. Linda had looked to her mother Mona to provide her with clues about how to live her own life, but all she saw in her mother was a woman who left everything half-done. Mona had wanted two children and only had one. She had thought that Kurt Wallander would be the great and only passion of her life, but she had divorced him and married a golf-playing retired banker in Malmö.

Eventually Linda had started looking more closely at her father, the detective chief inspector, the man who was always forgetting to pick her up at the airport when she came to visit. The one who never had time for her. She came to see that in spite of everything, now that her grandfather was dead, he was the one she was closest to. One morning, just after she had woken up, she had realized that what she wanted was to do what he did, be a police officer. She had kept her thoughts to herself for a year and only talked about it with her boyfriend at the time, but finally she became sure of it, broke up with her boyfriend, flew down to Skåne, took her father to this beach, and told him her news. He asked for a minute to digest what she had said, which made her suddenly anxious. Before she told him she was convinced he would be happy about her decision. Watching his broad back and his thinning hair blowing up in the wind, she prepared for a fight. But when he turned around and smiled at her, she knew.

They walked down to the beach. Linda poked her foot into some horse prints in the sand. Wallander looked at a seagull that hung almost motionless in the air.

What are your thoughts now? she asked.

You mean, about the house?

I mean, about the fact that I’ll soon be wearing a police uniform.

It’s hard for me even to imagine. It will probably be upsetting for me, though I don’t feel that way now.

Why upsetting?

I know what lies in store for you. It’s not hard to put the uniform on, but then to walk out in public is another thing. You’ll notice that everyone looks at you. You become the Police Officer, the one who is supposed to jump in and take care of any conflicts. I know what it feels like.

I’m not afraid.

I’m not talking about fear. I’m talking about the fact that from the first day you put on the uniform it will always be in your life.

She sensed he might be right.

How do you think I’ll do?

You did well at the academy. You’ll do well here. It’s up to you in the end.

They strolled along the beach. She told him she was about to go to Stockholm for a few days. Her graduating class was having a final party, a cadet ball, before everyone spread across the country to their new posts.

We never had anything like that, Wallander said. I didn’t receive much of an education, either. I still wonder how they chose the applicants when I was young. I think they were interested in raw strength. You had to have some intelligence, of course. I do remember that I had quite a few beers with a friend after I graduated. Not in public, but at his place on South Förstadsgatan in Malmö.

He shook his head. Linda couldn’t tell if the memory amused or pained him.

I was still living at home, he said. I thought Dad was going to keel over when I came home in my uniform.

How come he hated it so much—you becoming a police officer?

I think I only figured it out after he died. He tricked me.

Linda stopped.

Tricked you?

He looked at her, smiling.

What I think now is that it was actually fine with him that I chose to be a policeman. But instead of telling me straight out, it amused him to keep me on my toes. And he certainly managed to do that, as you know.

You really believe that?

No one knew him better than I did. I know I’m right. He was a scoundrel through and through. A wonderful man, but a scoundrel. The only father I ever had.

They walked back to the car. The clouds were breaking up, and it was getting warmer. Wallander looked down at his watch when they were leaving.

Are you in a hurry? he asked.

I’m in a hurry to start working, that’s all. Why do you ask?

There’s something I should look into. I’ll tell you about it while we drive.

They turned onto the highway to Trelleborg and turned off by Charlottenlund Castle.

I wanted to drive by since we were in the neighborhood.

Drive by what?

Marebo Manor. Or more precisely, Marebo Lake.

The road was narrow and windy. Wallander told her about it in a somewhat disjointed and confusing way. She wondered if his written police reports were as disorganized as the summary she was getting.

Yesterday evening a man had called the Ystad police. He had not given them a name or location and he spoke with a strange accent. He had said that burning swans were flying over Marebo Lake. When the officer on duty had asked him for more details, the man hung up. The conversation was duly logged, but no one had followed up on it since there had been a serious assault case in Svarte that evening, as well as two robberies in central Ystad. The officer in charge had decided that it was most likely a prank call or a matter of hallucinations, but when Wallander later heard about it from his colleague Martinsson he decided it was so bizarre that there might be some truth to it.

Setting fire to swans? Who would do anything like that?

A sadist. Someone who hates birds.

Do you honestly think it happened?

Wallander turned off onto a road leading to Marebo Lake and took his time before answering.

They didn’t teach you that at the academy? That policemen don’t think anything? They only want to know. But they have to remain open to all possibilities, however unlikely. That includes something like a report about burning swans. It could turn out to be true.

Linda didn’t ask any more questions. They parked the car in a small parking lot and walked down to the lake. Linda walked behind her father and felt as if she was already wearing a uniform.

They walked around the entire lake but found no trace of a dead swan. Neither of them noticed that someone was following their progress through the lens of a telescope.

4

Linda flew to Stockholm a few days later. Zeba had helped her make a dress for the cadet ball. It was light blue and cut low across her chest and back. The class organizers had rented a big room on Hornsgatan. All sixty-eight of them were there, even the prodigal son of the group who had not managed to hide his drinking problem. No one knew who had blown the whistle on him, so in a way they all felt responsible. Linda thought he was like their ghost; he would always be out there in the fall darkness with a deep-seated longing to be forgiven and taken back into the fold.

On this occasion, their last chance to say good-bye to each other and their teachers, Linda drank far too much wine. She wasn’t a novice drinker by any means, and she could usually pace herself. This evening she knew she was drinking too much. She felt more impatient than ever to start working as she talked with student colleagues who had already taken the plunge. Her best friend from the academy, Mattias Olsson, had taken a job in Norrköping rather than return to his home in Sundsvall. He had already managed to distinguish himself by felling a bodybuilder who had taken too many steroids and run amuck.

There was dancing, speeches, and a relatively amusing song roasting the teachers. Linda’s dress received many compliments. It would have been an altogether enjoyable evening if there hadn’t been a TV set in the kitchen.

Someone heard on the late-night news that a police officer had been shot down on the outskirts of Enköping. This news quickly spread among the dancing, intoxicated cadets and their teachers. The music was turned off and

Reviews for Before the Frost

[thorold_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Disappointing: you have to admire Mankell for having the courage to take on a plot about religious fanaticism that brings in references to both Jim Jones and 9/11, but ultimately he doesn't seem to get very much out of it. His villain comes over as over-done and improbable rather than dangerously mesmeric, and there is too much imbalance between the seriousness of the conspiracy and the trivial father-daughter-rivalry plot in the foreground. In the TV version of this story, both aspects were toned down quite a bit, and the balance felt much better. It's also all too easy to become irritated by crime stories that rely on police officers constantly going into dangerous places on their own and without telling their colleagues where they are. Contrary to what Mankell seems to think, it doesn't really help if you tell the reader that they know they shouldn't do this sort of thing...

[annelim_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Linda Wallander, Kurt Wallander's daughter, is waiting to start work as a policeman with her father. She gets involved in a murder case.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This one brings Inspector Wallander's daughter Linda into the center of the action, but the new central character doesn't weaken the novel. Linda is just out of the police academy, and gets involved in a case through the dissapearance of a friend of hers. This maintains the high standard of police procedurals in the earlier novels, and adds a new factor -- the evolving relationship between Wallander and his daughter.

[squeakychu · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was my first novel by Henning Mankell. Although I found it entertaining, there were things about it that drove me crazy.The story itself was about a man named Eric, a survivor of the mass suicide in Jonestone, Guyana, who makes his way to Sweden, where he plans to reunite with his daughter Anna whom he abandoned long ago. Eric leads a Christian cult which believes in animal and human sacrifice as well as church burning. This becomes a problem for police detective Kurt Wallender and his daughter Linda, who was soon to become a full fledged police officer.This Wallender guy...I certainly would not want him for a father. He is as nasty as he can be. I felt sorry for Linda throughout the whole book as she tried to work on the same case on which her dad was working, but all the time being scolded by him for one thing or another.Why in the world would a soon-to-be police officer enter a possible crime scene (where a woman had just disappeared) and move things around, look through her apartment without a warrant, and start reading her private diary? Oh. Okay. They were friends. That doesn't fly with me.Taking a pulse? Don't do it with your thumb...as instructed in this book. Your thumb has its own pulse.The end of this book? What did the suicide of an unrelated person have to do with Erich's story? Oh. It had to do with Linda's story? I was more interested in finding out to where Erich had suddenly disappeared.Why was the 9-11 disaster in the United States brought into this novel? It didn't have any connection to the main story at all. Will I read more Mankell books? Probably. This one was fun to listen to. I hope others will be better (read: have more cohesive story lines) and that Kurt Wallender will lighten up a bit on his daughter. Just sayin'.

[mporterf_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I didn't realize until after I was done with this that Mankell is the author of the stories behind the Wallander series starring Kenneth Branagh. Very interesting reading a mystery set in Sweden.

[ellenh_28 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was a dark, moody book. As were the Wallander shows on PBS, but it grabbed me and I spent a rainy day reading to the end.

[wyvernfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Linda Wallander is just about to join her father in the Ystad police force. While on leave between training and taking up the job her friend Anna goes missing. Meanwhile her father is investigating the mysterious slaugher and burning of some animals, hoping that this isn't going to lead to human murder.The interaction between the two is interesting and theres also other generational interactions in the story. Although you do know who does it the journey for the detectives to find that out as well is interesting.

[pnorman4345 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Our detective hero's daughter joins the police force. Fun watching the relationship develop and her role works well. The plot violates many rules: religious fanatics for one.

[rsummer_7 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Other reviewers have covered many of my perceptions about this book. It is my least favourite of all his books and only finished it because I generally like Henning Mankell's work. The religous people gone mad has been over worked by too many authors. The character of Linda Wallender is a bit thin plus the idea that she would be stationed to work in the police station where her father works is highly unlikely. The next hurdle is that she becomes involved in an investigation before she officially starts work as a police officer is just too much to accept.

[donaldgallinger_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Henning Mankell's Before the Frost combines the sleuthing skills of its main protagonist, Kurt Wallender and his daughter, Linda, who has now joined the force. Mankell takes us on his usual gripping journey as Kurt and Linda try to discover the identity of a murderer before he can kill again. This time, however, the murderer is fueled by religious mania, thus making Wallender's job more frustrating and dangerous as he attempts to decode a series of strange clues. Along the way, we are entertained by Kurt's evolving relationship with his grown up daughter as well as his insightful commentary on the demise of Sweden's social democratic society.Over and over, Mankell proves himself as one of the best crime novelists in the world. As always, he has written another gem.

[joycepa_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One of the latest entries in the Kurt Wallender series, Before the Frost features his 30 year old daughter Linda as the 3rd person narrator of the story.The Prologue, however, takes place at the mass suicide/massacre of the followers of the Revered Jim Jones at Jamestown in 1976, and recounts the escape of the single survivor. The first chapter of the book, which takes place in August, 2001, is a graphic account of the murder by burning of a flock of swans on the shores of a lake near Ystad. The murderer is not identified. The call to the police is not taken seriously. The book switches abruptly to Linda, who has recently completed Police Academy training, and who is staying with her father while waiting impatiently for the start of her posting with Wallender's station in Ystad at the beginning of September, 2001. The living arrangement does not proceed smoothly, although both make an effort to co-exist more or less peacefully.Bored, Linda looks up two old friends, Zeba, a single mother and Anna, a rather odd young woman with whom Linda has had a difficult history. During one visit, Anna confides to Linda that she believes that she has just seen her father, who disappeared 24 years ago without a trace.The very next day, Anna misses an arrranged meeting with Linda, who becomes convinced that Anna has disappeared. But she has no luck in convincing her father, who suddenly has on his hands the brutal murder and mutilation of an older woman. Frustrated with the response and worried that something may have happened to Anna, Linda begins her own investigation. This will lead her to a terrifying confrontation with the leaders of a bizarre Christian sect in which her own life and those ofher friends are in danger.With the exception of the Prologue and the first chapter, the book moves very slowly until about the half way point. Linda's obsession with the safety of Anna somehow does not ring true. As the action picks up, so does the pace, until the last quarter of the books is a true page-turning thriller.If you are one of many readers who wish to avoid descriptions of animal cruelty and torture, then do not read this book. There are 3 separate and brutal instances, fairly graphically described, especially the scene with the swans. While the incidents are integrated into the plot, one has to ask whether or not the story could have evolved without such violence towards animals. I suppose it is a measure of our times that we tend to look on the most barbarous acts of humans towards each other with a fair amount of indiffference, yet flinch when such acts are carried out against helpless animals. I personally lean towards the view, for this book, that the animal violence is gratuitous, and more in keeping with selling books to jaded audiences than as a necessary part of the plot. For me, the plot could have been contrived differently. As evidence for this view, I noted that while Wallender's reaction to the brutal murder of the woman is one of horror, no one seems very disturbed about the three animal cruelty/murder scenes. I really don't think that's indicative of Swedish culture. I think it's just the result of Mankell needing some species of cruelty to jack up the horror in the book.The writing is good, once the book picks up the pace. The characters are believable enough, and the plot is as well. Mankell's evocation of the Swedish landscape and culture is as always very good. But the slow pace of the first half and what I view as gratuitous animal cruelty bring the book down in my opinion.

[ttaisi5editor · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you like dark, brooding, well-written mysteries, then: go Scandinavian, and explore Henning Mankell. This book carries the Kurt Wallander series forward to a new level of intensity by including the detective's daughter, Linda, now a police cadet.

[bcquinnsmom · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm a huge Henning Mankell fan, and I love Kurt Wallander. All through the series, his daughter Linda has always been there, but here she plays a major role. The book is touted as "a Kurt and Linda Wallander novel," and from that I gather that he's planning to write more with the father-daughter duo as a unit. After Wallander solo, it's going to be tough, because that particular series is so good that it's really difficult to top. And thus, we come to this particular novel, Before the Frost.The novel opens with, of all things, an escapee from the horrible Jonestown Massacre that happened in Guyana in November of 1978. Fast forward a few years to an unknown figure setting swans on fire in Sweden. What the two have in common will be made obvious as the story progresses.Linda Wallander has finished up at the police academy and is waiting for her first assignment in Ystad. For the time being she's staying with her dad, Inspector Wallander, and decides to go catch up with some old friends. One of these friends, Anna, tells Linda that she's just seen her long-lost father, then Anna disappears. Linda tries to get her father interested in finding Anna, but Kurt Wallander and his team are looking into the disappearance and death of another woman, whose name mysteriously appears in Anna's journal, later found by Linda. The coincidence leads Wallander to believe that maybe Linda's got something here. From here, the story takes several strange twists and turns, and the investigation leads them to a rather bizarre group who have set a deadline for something terrible to happen.To be honest, this isn't my favorite book featuring Kurt Wallander. It tends to drag in places, is a bit melodramatic, and the core mystery is a bit over the top, as in the prior book featuring Wallander, Firewall. Considering that this is "Kurt and Linda" Wallander novel, Kurt tends to play less of a role than his daughter. My guess is that Mankell wants the readers to become more familiar with Linda in her new role, especially if there will be more novels featuring this pair. Many of the other characters, especially the really bad guys, just didn't ring true to me, and it seemed like the addition of Linda in her new role toned down the edginess and suspense of Mankell's other Wallander novels.Mankell is great at police procedurals as well as intense social criticism, and that's what keeps me reading his books. It will definitely be interesting (if he chooses to continue the series featuring father and daughter) to see if Linda Wallander and younger members of the police turn out to be as cynical about their society as is Kurt Wallander and his group, or if the generational aspect leads them to view things in a different light. I would still recommend it for Mankell and Wallander fans, and for fans of Swedish crime novels in general. I wouldn't make this one my first Wallander novel, but would definitely start with Faceless Killers and move through the series in order.Overall...not my favorite, but it wasn't bad, either.

[bookczuk · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

For some reason, I like mysteries set in Scandinavia. There are several authors that provide me with glimpses of the land I've longed to see since first really studying about it in fourth grade. Mankell is a familiar author for me, because of his series with Kurt Wallander. This one introduces daughter Linda, who is a cadet just finishing up at the police academy. There is a good bit of character interplay both within the Wallander family, and within the families of other characters -- the central core of the story revolving around the disappearance of one of Linda's friends, the supposed reappearance of that friend's father, who has been missing for 24 years, and a number of seemingly unrelated, but disturbing events, including the killing of some animals, and a murder. Mankell works the threads of the tale in his usual skillful manner, letting Kurt be a side character to daughter Linda. A good mystery and a nice branching out of a familiar series.

[shelleyraec · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I was not expecting the Jonestown introduction nor the September 11 ending in a book translated to English from Swedish. I actually struggled a bit with this book - it took a long time (around quarter of the way through the book) for the events described on the back to finally happen. The pace was slow - nothing hapened til it did and then it went back to meandering everywhere. There were a lot of story threads waving around, but it was difficult to see how they were relevant, even though they tied up reasonably neatly at the end . I struggled with the characters also, Wallender was on the wrong side of gruff and Linda was not very well developed and so not very likeable. Her naivite in regards to Anna's behaviour also stretched my credulity. It was Ok but I probably won't be reading him again.

[annikabirgitta · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

My least favorite Henning Mankell book and I've read most of them.. Just did not capture my attention. Might have been in the translation. Maybe I should have read it in my native Swedish.. But usually I prefer the English versions.

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm glad I decided not to bother trying to read this series in order, so that I can just dip in and out as I like. As with the past couple, this one's pretty dark, but they're great mysteries. The addition of Linda as a main character works well; it will be interesting to see where Mankell takes it.

[buffalogr · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Kurt Wallander's daughter Linda has plays a major role...we see him through her eyes...a different perspective. Some call her "annoying"--like him. Plot-wise, there are a couple of threads running through and they all come together at the end. As always, I'm struck by the American Idioms translated from Sweedish...weird.

[floratina · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

READ IN DUTCH

Mankell's Wallander series is the prototype of brooding kind of mystery and this series focuses on Wallander's daughter Linda. I also liked it, and always wondered why there were no more books in this series. Until I recently found out it was because the actress playing Linda committed suicide.

[mrtall_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This Henning Mankell/Kurt & Linda Wallander crime novel is about Muslim terrorists, even though they’re never mentioned in its pages. But by setting the book’s events in September 2001, Mankell couldn’t make his intentions clearer.Yet instead of facing up to the truth, Mankell chooses to construct a proxy for Muslim terrorists, i.e. a group of ‘Christian’ fanatics led by the sole survivor of the Jonestown Massacre. They’re a preposterous mishmash of false messianism, anti-abortionism, fire-and-brim-stone-end-of-the-world preaching, and, most tellingly, the desire to be martyrs. Now where do we hear that word these days?Mankell simplistically suggests that one believer is much the same as the next one, no matter what it is they actually believe, and that by implication it's plausible that a mob of Lutherans is lurking around the cathedral corner strapped up with bomb belts. Whether Mankell chooses this approach out of fear of offending Muslims, or simply from an I-don’t-want-to-think-about-it insistence that all believers are really fanatics, it undercuts his other many strengths as a writer of police procedurals.

[ecw0647 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I like Mankell, but this book seems to have fallen into the "Silence-of-the-Lambs-Syndrome" that seems to have become endemic. It's not enough to have someone get killed in the heat of passion or for greed. Now killers have to have killed hundreds, kill animals, butcher little children, bring about the end of the world, etc., etc. I hate to break it to these authors, but evil is much more prosaic and often very subtle. You don't have to create monsters to write intelligently. Adolf Eichmann was the guy next door who was just really good at paperwork. OK, enough ranting.

Just how much do we know about our close friends; even our family. That might be one theme of this Wallender novel.

Linda Wallender takes center stage. Two threads start the book: a man is setting swans alight and Anna, Linda’s friend has disappeared shortly after insisting she has just seen her father who hasn’t been heard from in 25 years. A third strand is added when a woman whose life's work has been to explore and catalog old pilgrim trails disappears, only to be found dismembered in a small cabin in the woods.

It's not too hard to predict that those threads will all wind together soon. Kurt and Linda are equally irascible but have worked out a precarious truce. Linda, recent graduate of the police academy, hasn't been yet assigned to begin work at a station so she spends her time trying to track down Anna. Wallender is a harsh father who has trouble relating to his daughter and she has little patience with her father although both try to find an accommodation as Linda, with the curiosity of a seasoned detective, inserts herself into her father's formal investigation, much to his dismay and irritation.

[SPOILER: well,hardly a spoiler since it's revealed way early, and if you read the book's description there are spoilers out the wazoo, but...] The best parts of the book are investigative; the worst the insertion of Jim Jones and his relationship to one of the characters. That was unnecessary and dumb. Not worthy of Mankell. It almost seemed as if Mankell had to say something about Jones and this was his vehicle.

[jbreedlove_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sneaky dense read with the point of view being from daughter Linda instead of Kurt Wallander. Smooth character intros that were deep enough and a Linda Wallander is described in a fuller if more eccentric and intense character. The story was smooth and everything fit. Though it worked, like numerous writers, Mankell needed an uber villain. Kurt the father seemed more of a caricature at times and Linda just kept making stupid moves in the field. A hard to put down sort of read.