Book Reviews
If a Raymond Chandler effect is the goal, the humdrum plot interferes.... The intrigue surrounding the murders dissipates. Detectives fade to distant bystanders.... Mankell’s fierce instinct for social criticism is admirable. If only it didn’t sabotage the opportunity for old-fashioned whodunit delight.
Mike Peed - New York Times
It may not be flawless, but Henning Mankell's The Man From Beijing is a great mystery that belongs in the company of other knockout masterpieces of moral complexity and atmosphere like Dorothy Sayers's The Nine Tailors, Robert Goddard's Beyond Recall, Barbara Vine's A Dark-Adapted Eye and Mankell's own brilliant 2002 gloomfest, One Step Behind. The new novel's ambitious plotting alone should be dissected and taught in MFA programs...a brilliant tale of suspense and substance that dedicated mystery readers will want to savor.
Maureen Corrigan - Washington Post
Mankell succeeds in transfixing the reader with a masterly balance of character sketches and pell-mell storytelling. He is entirely convincing in his depiction of ordinary people becoming enmeshed in geopolitical intrigue.
Wall Street Journal
The book cements Mankell’s reputation as Sweden’s greatest living mystery writer.... Roslin is a sort of Nordic Miss Marple.
Los Angeles Times
Mankell’s new book is an original but still chock-a-block with gory crime combined with hints of the late Stieg Larsson’s social concern and John le Carré’s international intrigue.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Over the past decade or so, Henning Mankell has built a large audience that, even now, in the (mostly) snowless U.S., can’t wait to find copies of his new snowbound work of mystery. The Man from Beijing more than repays such patience. It’s a terrific police procedural.... Despite the broad reach of the plot, the book never puts the reader in danger of losing interest.
Alan Cheuse - Dallas Morning News
A massacre in the remote Swedish village of Hesjövallen propels this complex, if diffuse, stand-alone thriller from Mankell (The Pyramid). Judge Birgitta Roslin, whose mother grew up in the village, comes across diaries from the house of one of the 19 mostly elderly victims kept by Jan Andrén, an immigrant ancestor of Roslin's. The diaries cover Andrén's time as a foreman on the building of the transcontinental railroad in the United States. An extended flashback charts the journey of a railroad worker, San, who was kidnapped in China and shipped to America in 1863. After finding evidence linking a mysterious Chinese man to the Hesjövallen murders, Roslin travels to Beijing, suspecting that the motive for the horrific crime is rooted in the past. While each section, ranging in setting from the bleak frozen landscape of northern Sweden to modern-day China bursting onto the global playing field, compels, the parts don't add up to a fully satisfying whole.
Publishers Weekly
A 2006 massacre in Sweden reverberates back to 19th-century China and America in this stand-alone by the author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries. When 19 of the 22 residents of a Swedish hamlet are brutally murdered, Judge Brigitta Roslin discovers that the victims include her late mother's foster parents, so she looks into the case, offering a theory counter to that of local authorities. Even after the arrest of a local man who confesses and then commits suicide, Roslin continues probing in a quest that eventually takes her to China and puts her in mortal danger. And she finds that revenge—whether sweet or best served cold—is a powerful motivator even after a century and a half. Verdict: Most compelling at the beginning and end, this sprawling novel becomes a leisurely examination of history's injustices and consequences as well as an intriguing postulation of how China might meet its most pressing societal problem. Mankell humanizes the earnest, even meddlesome Roslin, so that the reader can't help but wish her well. Already an international best seller, this seems destined for success here, too. —Michele Leber, Arlington, VA
Library Journal
The opening set piece, in which the murders are discovered, is a stunner, and the finale, in a London restaurant, is equally gripping. Yes, Mankell overextends himself here, but he also shows why he remains a must-read for anyone interested in the international crime novel. —Bill Ott
Booklist
A sweepingly ambitious tale of corruption, injustice and revenge that ranges over three continents and 140 years, from the creator of Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander (The Pyramid, 2008, etc.). The first person to discover the massacre at Hesjovallen is so horrified that he suffers a fatal heart attack and is hit by a truck. The stabbing and hacking of 19 neighbors and their pets in ten houses has decimated the village. Duty officer Vivi Sundberg, called to the scene, swiftly realizes that all the victims except for one unidentified boy share one of three last names—Andersson, Andren or Magnusson—and theorizes that in a community likely to be marked by inbreeding, they may all be members of a single family. Birgitta Roslin, a judge in Helsingborg whose mother's foster parents were among the victims, connects the horror to a smaller-scale but equally brutal murder spree: the slaughter of Jack Andren and his wife and children in Reno, Nev. A long flashback to the shameful treatment of Chinese slave laborers on the American transcontinental railroad in the 1860s supplies further hints as to the motive. But it's not until Birgitta travels to Beijing to accompany a friend on a business trip—and to gather information about a mysterious Chinese man who booked a hotel room near Hesjovallen the week of the crime—that a clear portrait of the killer begins to emerge. The improbable but touching friendship Birgitta strikes up with Hong Qui, the sister of a powerful player in the high-stakes game of Beijing construction, serves as the nerve center of Mankell's sprawling tale, even though it reveals more information to the reader than to Birgitta. Another long detour, this one to contemporary Zimbabwe, adds new resonance to the massacre back in Sweden before [Mankell] brings down the curtain in London's Chinatown. Breathtakingly bold in its scope. If Mankell never links his far-flung, multigenerational horrors closely together, that's an important part of his point.
Kirkus Reviews