The Man From Beijing (2010)

The pleasures of a Henning Mankell book have much to do with Kurt Wallander, his crabby but appealing Swedish police inspector. The Man From Beijing, though, is a one-off, a complex and enormously satisfying thriller that features not Wallander but a female equivalent, Judge Birgitta Roslin. The massacre of 19 people in a remote snowbound village shocks all of Sweden, but no one more than Roslin, who has family ties to the place. Roslin is soon swept into a vast spiderwebbed story that spans two centuries and three continents, moving back and forth between Sweden, Beijing, and America. Flashbacks rarely work in mysteries, but here they do, thanks to Mankell's sheer skill. This is hands down the best thriller I've read in five years. A

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