Kurt Wallander, the rumpled, harried, imperfect protagonist of the novels, is always a candidate. In this one, he faces age, mortality, the final falling-apart - and a huge, ever-unraveling mystery, pulling in himself, his family - and the recent political history of Sweden.
The troubled man could also be Håkan von Enke, a retired navy commander. He's the father of the man living with Wallander's daughter, Linda - and also a pursued man, always looking over his shoulder. When first Håkan and then his wife, Louise, disappear, the fatal machine starts moving. Even though he's suspended from police duty at the moment, Wallander gets pulled into the investigation.
Håkan may be paranoid, but sometimes paranoia is reasonable. Sometimes the bad guys are coming to get you. This truth plays out in the larger scheme of The Troubled Man (Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95) as it takes on two shadows over Swedish history and politics.
The first is the scandal of Russian submarines supposedly sighted off the coast of Sweden in the 1980s. "There were no subs, or if there were, they were American, not Russian," Mankell says from his home outside Gothenburg, Sweden. In Mankell's view, "We were told something that wasn't true - this charade of neutrality, when Sweden was never neutral. We have always been complicit." After finishing The Troubled Man, some readers have felt that the United States comes off as worse than the Soviet Union. But what hurts Mankell most, he says, is the lie Sweden told its people. That scandal still reverberates in Swedish politics today. "Only now are we facing it in our social discussion," he says.
