Kurt Wallander is a hard-drinking, opera-loving Swedish police inspector. His personal life is falling apart. His wife has left him, his daughter won t acknowledge him and even his ageing father barely tolerates him. Then he is forced to confront an appalling crime. An old couple are brutally murdered in their remote farmhouse and suspicion falls on the immigrant community. Right wing racists are stirred into action by reports of the murder in the press. In Wallander Henning Markell has created an old-style policeman obliged to come to terms with a modern Sweden riven by violence and racial tension. In the first of the acclaimed Wallander novels, he mixes the elements of American noir fiction with a very European sense of melancholia and mortality. It is a world where crimes are solved as much by tireless drudgery as by flashes of inspiration and where truth, although still worth seeking, is elusive.