After the fire

Review by New York Times Review

harry bosch is a one-of-a-kind hero who started out pretty wild when he returned from Vietnam to become a cop, but over the years he's developed into someone you want to ride with. Michael Connelly's two kinds of TRUTH (Little, Brown, $29) picks up the former homicide detective three years after he was forced into retirement from the Los Angeles Police Department. Since then, he's been doing volunteer work on cold cases for the San Fernando force, working out of an office in the onetime drunk tank of the county jail. ("Sometimes I think I can still smell the puke.") The first plotline presents itself when Bosch opens the unsolved case of Esmerelda Tavares, who supposedly walked out of her house 15 years earlier, leaving her sleeping baby behind. Up next is something that spells real trouble for the detective. The L.A.P.D.'s Conviction Integrity Unit comes calling to challenge him on behalf of Preston Borders, a serial murderer he put away back in 1988. Using new DNA tests, a review of the evidence indicates that another man, a rapist who has since died, was the real killer and Borders is about to be set free. (The matter is eventually resolved in tense courtroom scenes featuring Mickey Haller, Bosch's half brother and an ace litigator.) The third and most disturbing case in this jam-packed narrative is as ugly as today's headlines, the double murder of father-andson pharmacists that opens up an investigation into a newfangled twist on the prescription drugs racket. (With "55,000 dead and counting," Harry is told, this is "the growth industry of this country.") It seems that international racketeers have an elaborate system for moving drugs, enslaving homeless addicts who need to feed their habit. Bosch does great work undercover as a strung-out oxycodone user, although he nearly gets himself killed in a spectacular way. Connelly's cop has always been a tough guy, but here he reveals a compassionate side. He's haunted by that abandoned baby. He keeps replaying his first sight of the father-and-son pharmacists. And when he finds himself among the oxy addicts, he feels uncomfortably close to his fellow man. DESPITE THE FALSE IMPRESSION left by two misbegotten movies, Jack Reacher is a big guy, so big that someone calls him "Bigfoot." Lee Child makes that clear in THE MIDNIGHT LINE (Delacorte, $28.99), which puts Reacher just where we want him - on an endless road trip, hitching rides and serving as "human amphetamine" for tired truckers by keeping them awake. (Standing sideways with one foot in the traffic lane is supposed to disguise some of that 6-foot-5-inch, 250-pound bulk.) Reacher is headed nowhere when he stops at the window of a pawnshop "on the sad side of a small town." On impulse, he buys a handsome ring, obviously made for a woman, engraved with "West Point" and "2005." "I know how hard she worked for this," he tells the shop owner. "So now I'm wondering what kind of unlucky circumstance made her give it up." Honor bound, Child's road warrior marches into a dirty criminal enterprise that preys on wounded veterans, which saddens Reacher and makes him very, very angry. IF YOU CAN pick up CRAZY LIKE A FOX (Ballantine, $27) and recognize the voices of Comet, a wise old gray fox; Dasher, a hound at the top of his game; and Golliwog, a snippy calico cat, you qualify as a member of the pack that surrounds Sister Jane Arnold, Master of Jefferson Hunt and the sleuth in Rita Mae Brown's enchanting novels set in the Virginia horse country. Many of the human characters are rich and social, some with "new money" and others with roots in the old Southern aristocracy. They keep horses and live in houses "filled with history, murders, fire, the severing of family ties, and neverending stories of ghosts." Sure enough, on a visit to the Museum of Hounds and Hunting, Sister thinks she sees the ghostly figure of Wesley Carruthers stealing a valuable old hunting horn, and the evidence is right there on her friend's cellphone. That's just the kind of story that adds to the charm of Brown's whimsical mysteries, with their thrilling hunts and intelligent animals. THE GREAT SWEDISH author Henning Mankell died in 2015, leaving one last, gutwrenching novel behind. AFTER THE FIRE (Vintage, paper, $16.95), translated by Marlaine Delargy, is that novel. Fans of Kurt Wallander may be disappointed since this book doesn't feature Mankell's towering detective, who solved his last case in 2011 in "The Troubled Man." Here Mankell's narrator is Fredrik Welin, and he's nothing like Wallander. A former surgeon, now 70 years old, Welin abandoned civilized society in shame many years earlier and lives by himself on a remote island. "I couldn't for the life of me understand why I should stop communicating with old friends just because they were dead," he says, explaining why he doesn't exactly feel isolated. When someone sets his house on fire, the police are as baffled as he is, eventually concluding that Welin set the blaze himself. To clear his name and salvage something of his old life, this reclusive man must return to the outside world - but not before Mankell scalds us with his searing thoughts about being old and living alone. ? Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 12, 2017]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Seventy-year-old Fredrik Welin lives a solitary life in his grandparents' house on a remote island off the coast of Sweden. Then disaster strikes. Having lost his surgical license years earlier after a botched operation, he awakens to a raging fire in which he loses everything else, save a mismatched pair of Wellingtons and a buckle from his Italian shoes. When arson is determined to be the cause of the fire, Welin discovers that he is a suspect. As he considers this unjust suspicion and whether to rebuild his house, he is consoled by his burgeoning friendship with reporter Lisa Modin and a renewed relationship with his daughter, Louise, who is pregnant at the age of 40. Two local residents die, and two more houses burn in the same manner as his, as Welin ponders his past and expresses concerns about mortality in this sequel to Italian Shoes (2009). But this novel, the last written by Mankell (who died of cancer in 2015 at the age of 67), also brings resolution, dissipating concerns about death, and a welcome sense of tranquility. One hopes that the author, most revered for his Nordic mysteries but equally adept, as he shows here, at literary fiction, found the same peace he grants his legendary crime-fiction protagonist, Kurt Wallander. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY:This last novel is an appropriate coda for the opus of Mankell, most renowned for his Wallander mysteries but also known for literary and historical fiction.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

On a rocky, remote private island in a Swedish archipelago, 70-year-old Fredrik Welin wakes to a searing light. He stumbles outside, recovering only a raincoat and two left boots on the way, and watches helplessly as his house burns to its foundations. This final novel from Mankell (the Kurt Wallander series), posthumously published in a stunning English translation, questions what happens to a person who has lost everything-and who considers himself too old to rebuild. Fredrik hardly has time to grieve the memories that burned along with the house's contents; when investigators arrive to inspect the smoking ruins, they discover clear signs of arson. Could it be insurance fraud? Or does the responsibility lie with one of Fredrik's neighbors, whom he's known for years and who showed up in their boats to battle the flames? And how will Fredrik's daughter-pregnant and harboring secrets of her own-react to the loss of her inheritance? Mankell's understated yet thrilling use of language brings both the rugged scenery and Fredrik's deep-rooted loneliness to life. It's a skillfully told, exquisitely structured story filled with sharp insights into human nature and unflinching examinations of the complex relationships to which people bind themselves in order to feel a little bit less alone. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Acclaimed Swedish crime novelist Mankell is perhaps best known for his series of Kurt Wallander novels, made into a TV series starring Kenneth Branagh. Concerning a mysterious fire set at the isolated home of disgraced 70-year-old Swedish physician Fredrik Welin, who lives alone on a small island off the coast, this new book-the final novel Mankell worked on before he died in 2015-is in many ways also a crime novel. But it is so much more: it's also a gripping, deeply moving philosophical meditation on life, loneliness, and old age. During the course of the book, Welin's estranged daughter, his only child, reestablishes communication with him and announces that she is pregnant. Welin also strikes up an unlikely friendship with a female reporter who interviews him for the local newspaper about the fire. These unlikely developments coax Welin, who at the beginning of the novel has essentially given up and is waiting to die, back into the world of living and loving. Mankell handles this all with great compassion, humor, and humility. Verdict A powerful celebration of life wrapped in a Swedish crime novel; enthusiastically recommended for fans of literary fiction.-Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Eight years after his barren but settled life was harrowed by a series of once-in-a-lifetime crises (Italian Shoes, 2009), ignominiously retired surgeon Fredrik Welin is beset by an even more traumatic event in this final novel by the creator of beloved police detective Kurt Wallander.Awakening one night to find his house on fire, Welin has just enough time to don two boots before fleeing the inferno. The home built by his grandparents is a dead loss, along with everything inside it; even the pair of boots he grabbed wasn't really a pair. Thinking of Louise, the daughter whose existence he never suspected until she was an adult, he reflects: "Did I want to rebuild the house or should I let Louise inherit the site of a fire?" That pivotal question is complicated by several other developments. Louise is a thief and perhaps a prostitute; she won't tell Welin who fathered her baby; she's arrested on a trip to Paris; and in the meantime, the local police have shown considerable interest in Welin as the leading suspect in what looks more and more like a case of arson. Even the new boots he orders turn out to be the wrong size. Only his growing friendship with journalist Lisa Modin seems to hold out any hope of renewal for Welin's frozen life. Yet here too the path is strewn with difficulties: Lisa is a generation younger than Welin, she has baggage of her own, and it's not at all obvious that she returns his romantic interest. No wonder Welin concludes, "There was no god in my caravan." Yet amid all his ruminations and flashbacks and flirtations with despair, Mankell shows his unlikely hero's indomitable will to survive and, if possible, to make the next chapter of his life an improvement on what's gone before. A bracing look at a twilight year in the life of an old man who, when confronted daily by perfectly good reasons for giving up altogether, doesn't so much rise above as plow stoically through them. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1        My house burned down on an autumn night almost a year ago. It was a Sunday. The wind had got up during the afternoon and by the evening the anemometer indicated that the gusts measured over twenty metres per second.        The wind was coming from the north and was very chilly in spite of the fact that it was still early autumn. When I went to bed at around half past ten I thought that this would be the first storm of the season, moving in across the island I had inherited from my maternal grandparents.        Soon it would be winter. One night the sea would slowly begin to ice over.        That was the first night I wore socks to bed. The cold was tightening its grip.        The previous month, with some difficulty, I had managed to fix the roof. It was a big job for a small workman. Many of the slates were old and cracked. My hands, which had once held a scalpel during complex surgical procedures, were not made for manipulating broken tiles.        Ture Jansson, who had spent his entire working life as the postman out here in the islands before he retired, agreed to fetch the new slates from the harbour although he refused to accept any payment. As I have set up an improvised surgery in my boathouse in order to deal with all his imaginary medical complaints, perhaps he thought he ought to return the favour.        For years now I have stood there on the jetty by the boathouse examining his allegedly painful arms and back. I have brought out the stethoscope which hangs beside a decoy duck and established that his heart and lungs sound absolutely fine. In every single examination I have found Jansson to be in the best of health. His fear of these imaginary ailments has been so extreme that I have never seen anything like it in all my years as a doctor. He was simultaneously the postman and a full-time hypochondriac.        On one occasion he insisted he had toothache, at which point I refused to have anything to do with his problem. I don't know whether he went to see a dentist on the mainland or not. I wonder if he's ever had a single cavity. Perhaps he was in the habit of grinding his teeth while he was asleep, and that's what caused the pain?        On the night of the fire I had taken a sleeping tablet as usual and dropped off almost immediately.        I was woken by a light being switched on. When I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by a dazzling brightness. Beneath the ceiling of my bedroom I could see a band of grey smoke. I must have pushed off my socks in my sleep when the room got hot. I leaped out of bed, ran down the stairs and into the kitchen through that harsh, searing light. The clock on the wall was showing nineteen minutes past midnight. I grabbed my black raincoat from the hook by the back door, pulled on my wellington boots, one of which was almost impossible to get my foot into, and rushed outside.        The house was already in flames, the fire roaring. I had to go down to the jetty and the boathouse before the heat became unbearable. During those first few minutes I didn't even think about what had caused this disastrous conflagration; I just watched as the impossible unfolded before my eyes. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would be smashed to pieces inside my chest. The fire was ravaging me in equal measure.        Time melted away in the heat. Boats began to arrive from the other islands and skerries, the residents rudely woken from their sleep, but afterwards I was unable to say how long it took or who was there. My gaze was fixed on the flames, the sparks whirling up into the night sky. For one terrifying moment I thought I saw the elderly figures of my grandmother and my grandfather standing on the far side of the fire.        There are not many of us out here on the islands in the autumn, when the summer visitors disappear and the last of the yachts return to their home harbours, wherever those might be. But someone had seen the glow of the fire in the darkness, the message had been passed along, and everyone wanted to help. The coastguard's firefighting equipment was used to pump up seawater and spray it on the burning building, but it was too late. All it changed was the smell. Charred oak timbers and wall panels, burned wallpaper and linoleum flooring combined with salt water to give off an unforgettable stench. When dawn broke all that remained was a smoking, stinking ruin. The wind had dropped - the storm had already moved on, heading towards the Gulf of Finland - but it had fulfilled its spiteful task, working together with the blaze, and now there was nothing left of my grandparents' pretty house.        That was when I first thought to ask myself: how had the fire broken out? I hadn't lit any candles or left any of the old paraffin lamps burning. I hadn't had a cigarette or used the wood-burning stove. The electrical wiring throughout the house had been renewed just a few years ago.        It was as if the house had set fire to itself.        As if a house could commit suicide as a result of weariness, old age and sorrow.        I realised I had been mistaken about a key aspect of my life. After performing an operation that went disastrously wrong and led to a young woman losing her arm, I moved out here many years ago. Back then I often thought that the house in which I was living had been here on the day when I was born, and that it mwould still be here on the day when I no longer existed.        But I was mistaken. The oak trees, the birches, the alders and the single ash tree would remain here after I was gone, but of my beautiful home in the archipelago only the foundations, hauled to the island across the ice from the long-defunct quarry at Hakansborg, would remain.        My train of thought was interrupted as Jansson appeared beside me. He was bare-headed, wearing very old dark blue overalls and a pair of motorcycle gloves that I recognised from the winters when the ice had not been thick enough to drive across, and he had used his hydrocopter to deliver the post.        He was staring at my old green wellingtons. When I looked down I realised I had pulled on two left boots in my haste. Now I understood why it had been so difficult to put one of them on.        'I'll bring you a boot,' Jansson said. 'I've got a few pairs back at home.'        'There might be a spare pair down in the boathouse,' I suggested.        'No. I've been to look. There are some leather shoes and some old crampons people used to fix onto their boots when they went out on the ice clubbing seals.'        The fact that Jansson had already been rooting around in my boathouse shouldn't have surprised me, even if on this occasion he had done it out of consideration. I already knew that he was in the habit of going in there. Jansson was a snooper. From an early stage I had been convinced that he read every postcard that passed through his hands when the summer visitors bought their stamps down by the jetties.        He looked at me with tired eyes. It had been a long night.        'Where will you live? What are you going to do now?'        I didn't reply because I didn't have an answer.        I shuffled closer to the smoking ruin. The boot on my right foot was chafing. This is what I own now, I thought. Two wellingtons that aren't even a pair. Everything else is gone. I don't even have any clothes.        At that moment, as I grasped the full extent of the disaster that had befallen me, it was as if a howl swept through my body. But I heard nothing. Everything that happened within me was soundless.        Jansson appeared beside me once more. He has a curious way of moving, as if he has paws instead of feet. He comes from nowhere and suddenly materialises. He seems to know how to stay out of another person's field of vision all the time.        Why hadn't his wretched house on Stangskar burned down instead?        Jansson gave a start as if he had picked up on my embittered thought, but then I realised I had pulled a face, and he thought it was because he had come too close.        'You can come and stay with me, of course,' he offered when he had recovered his equilibrium.        'Thank you.'        Then I noticed my daughter Louise's caravan, which was behind Jansson in a grove of alders alongside a tall oak tree that had not yet lost all its leaves. The caravan was still partly concealed by its low branches.        'I've got the caravan,' I said. 'I can live there for the time being.'        Jansson looked surprised but didn't say anything.        All the people who had turned up during the night were starting to head back to their boats, but before they left they came over to say they were happy to help with whatever I needed.        During the course of a few hours my life had changed so completely that I actually needed everything.        I didn't even have a matching pair of wellingtons. Excerpted from After the Fire by Henning Mankell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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