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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 839.7374
EAN num: 9781400031566
ISBN number: 1400031567
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 432
Printing Date: May 13, 2003
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: May 13, 2003
Sale Popularity Level: 63917
Studio: Vintage
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Product Description:
Fourth in the Kurt Wallander series.
In the award-winning Sidetracked, Kurt Wallander is called to a nearby rapeseed field where a teenage girl has been loitering all day long. He arrives just in time to watch her douse herself in gasoline and set herself aflame. The subsequent day he is called to a beach where Sweden’s former Minister of Justice has been axed to death and scalped. The murder has the obvious markings of a demented serial killer, and Wallander is frantic to find him before he strikes again. But his investigation is beset with a handful of obstacles—a department distracted by the threat of impending cutbacks and the frivolity of World Cup soccer, a tenuous long-distance relationship with a murdered policeman’s widow, and the unshakably haunting preoccupation with the young girl who set herself on fire. Fascinating and astute, Sidetracked is a compelling mystery enhanced by keen social awareness.
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Rated by buyers -
Len, thank you for recommending that people begin with Mankell's very first book and proceed from there. Too often, books are read out of order and in most cases, it doesn't work as well. I think, series, especially, should be read in order. Not only do you miss a lot of the characterization, but most writers get better as they go along. This is true here, with Henning Mankell. Also, there seems to be more than one translator, and that can also make a big difference. I'm really enjoying these books and highly recommend them. But I do miss Martin Beck! West New York, NJ 09/13/08
Rated by buyers 
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Unless I'm missing something major, I knew everything that was going to happen in this book by maybe 1/4 of the way through. There are no cliffhangers, no hair's-breadth escapes, no Sudden Realizations That The World Is A Far Blacker Place Than Anyone Previously Fathomed.
It starts so promisingly. Inspector Kurt Wallander is called to a farmer's field where a girl has been standing all day. The farmer has tried to get her off his field all day, and finally he's called the cops. Wallander chases her around the field until, unexpectedly, she douses herself with a can of gasoline and lights herself on fire.
The subsequent day Wallander happens upon a murder victim whose head has been split in two and who's been scalped.
How could these two ghastly events be connected?
Isn't that a promising beginning? Yet without cliffhangers or much in the way of actual drama (the initial killing, and subsequent ones, are deployed with a minimum of fuss), what sustains the story? Mankell has left himself few choices: it can't rest on anything but Wallander's thought processes. We watch him try to reach the same conclusions that we had reached long ago. Perhaps Mankell hopes that'll be enough -- that we'll grow tense as Wallander comes closer to the truth. If so, Mankell hasn't set up enough architecture to make it so. There's a moment of tension toward the end, and Mankell executes that moment quite competently. But then it's over. Almost as soon as that climax happens, it's as though Mankell has grown bored of his own book.
Let's not even speak of the dialogue, which is dreary and flat. Characters say near-clichés like "...Unless he strikes again" as though reading them directly from a bus schedule.
Just a flat book. Enough energy to sustain you for 400 pages, but just barely. Having put it down, it's unlikely I'll remember anything from it a month from now. And I'm not tempted to read any more Mankell.
Rated by buyers 
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I thank fellow reviewer Leonard Fleisig for bringing this author to my attention. The writing is simply superb. I am very interested in reading more books by the Mankell. So far, I have bought and read six novels in the Wallander series.
I thought that the novel was excellent up to a point. But then when the bloody and gruesome murders go on and on - and right to the end - it becomes a bit too much. For that reason I think that Faceless Killers or One Step Behind are his best novels. But the present novel is not far behind. This problem with the murders is that the story is set over a very short time frame, and Wallander does not have enough time to solve the case. I thought that Mankell was doing a great job with the novel and it might be his best, until the murders become tiresome. The novel reminded me a bit of the Peter Robinson Inspector Banks series and of course here the multiple murders set the structure of the novel.
The book opens with a map of southern Sweden showing the location of the town of Ystad. The latter is the primary setting, although the crimes are spread around the southern part of Sweden. The police station is located in Ystad which is near the most southerly part of Sweden, south and east of Malmo and on the Baltic. Malmo itself is on the west coast of Sweden, just 10 km across the narrow straights from Copenhagen. Part of the tale takes place in Malmo and part in Helsingborg, north of Malmo.
I will not give away the plot and the essential plot elements are outlined by the publisher: there is a series of murders and an unrelated suicide. The policeman, Kurt Wallender, takes a personal interest in the suicide, and is somewhat "sidetracked."
This is a great and a fast read that I was able to read with a great deal of enjoyment in less than a day or two - even though it is 500 pages. I read it while staying at a hotel in southern Sweden, not too far from the crime scene, and that the details and descriptions of the places, people, and other details are made to seem authentic.
This is a book that I highly recommend, but because of the multiple murders it merits between 4 and 5 stars. The writing is smooth and flawless.
Rated by buyers -
A policeman's lot is not a happy one! W.S. Gilbert.
Even in Sweden if Henning Mankell's police procedurals provide any clue. Detective Inspector Wallander's lot is not a happy one in "Sidetracked". By the time you get through the very first two chapters Wallander has seen an unidentified teenage girl douse herself with gasoline and watched helplessly as she burned to death. He is then placed in charge of the investigation of the murder of a former Minister of Justice who was killed with an axe and then scalped. To make matters worse, while Wallander is busy trying to solve these apparently unrelated events, Sweden has pretty much come to a standstill as the whole nation (with the possibly sole exception of Wallander) as it watches Sweden's run to third place in the 1994 World Cup. As Sweden's World Cup fever increases the scalper strikes again and again and Wallander feels as if he is the only person not glued to a TV set.
Mankell's Kurt Wallander series is often compared to the Martin Beck detective mysteries authored by the husband and wife team of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall. Wallander, like Beck, is a police detective in Sweden. Unlike Beck, whose beat was Stockholm, Wallander works in the small southern-Swedish city of Ystad. The Wallander series takes place in the 1990s while the Beck series took place in the 1960s and 1970s. Although I tend to prefer the Beck series, the Wallander books are entertaining page-turners. Mankell stays well within the `police procedural' formula and has not tried to reinvent the genre. However, he has done a good job of developing the character of Mankell and his supporting cast of characters. Wallander is no Sherlock Holmes and gets results more by perspiration than inspiration. He is also a fully drawn character. We see him dealing with the break-up of a marriage, an estranged daughter, and a father who is developing senile dementia. The supporting characters, particularly his fellow detectives, are also well drawn.
I thought Mankell did a good job in Sidetracked. As the plot is advanced we see Wallander struggling to find clues and then struggling to get a grasp of their meaning. The reader has an advantage in that Mankell reveals more to the reader than to Wallander. The interest for the reader (or at least for me) is to see Wallander gradually put the pieces together. Basically, this is a well-written police procedural. It does not break new ground or transcend its genre but it is a very entertaining, if sometimes depressing, book to read.
Potential readers should know that this is the fifth in a series of Kurt Wallander mysteries. (There is likely to be a Comment under this review with a list of Wallander books in chronological order.) Although each stands on its own as a self-contained story there is a lot of subtext that may be lost on readers who read the books out of order. Mankell's characters and their relationships with each other evolve over time. I suggest that anyone interested in this series start of with the very first book, Faceless Killers, before picking up Sidetracked. Some books in the series are more entertaining than others but I don't regret having read the very first five books. Recommended. L. Fleisig
Rated by buyers 
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I found this book being given away and figured I'd read it based upon the glowing reader reviews on Amazon.com and the CWA Gold Dagger award for this book. I'm sorry that I read it. It's a decent book, but not great. It was not worth my time. The characters are flat and uninteresting, the dialogue is flat, and it wasn't much of a page-turner. Basically, it's an unexciting book that leaves you on a down -- kind of like the Swedish personality in general -- which is a theme of the book itself. While I'm not a mystery-book junkie, I'm open to the genre. If this book constitutes an award winner, then I'm hesitant to read much else in this genre that is celebrated by the "experts."
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