"The Man Who Smiled" by Henning Mankell

When I first discovered Mankell ("The Dogs of Riga") I genuinely found these Inspector Wallander mysteries to be a rip-roaring read, full of Nordic melancholia and wind-whipped landscapes. Now those in the know have deemed him to be the Next Big Thing in crime writing and the BBC have started filming the books, while I am becoming more dissatisfied with each one I read. I know I've accused him of this before, but there's a distinct whiff of the production line about the more recent Wallander novels. Henning is good at building suspense but the plot never really seems to go anywhere - there's even a part where he himself admits nothing is happening!! He really skimps on the minor characters (all we're told about the main "villain" is that he's tanned, smiles a lot and wears well-cut suits) which definitely wasn't the case in the earlier books. I mean, I know detective novels aren't supposed to be Dickens but come on.. Even the motive for the crime is never properly explained, we're just told that the two solicitors found out "things they weren't happy with" in the dealings of a billionaire industrialist - errr alright then. And he's tried to mix in so many different elements - body part smuggling, local council fraud, big business (Nokia gets a name-check) - that he doesn't have time to develop any of them properly. As always, the characters of the various police officers are well-drawn, but that's no use if they only exist alongside paper cut-outs. And even then, I'm not sure how much knowledge gained from the other books I'm bringing to the party. Frankly disappointing. For more info about Mankell, check out his official website here.