An Event in Autumn by Henning Mankell, a Mysterious Review.

Review: Swedish detective Kurt Wallander is nearing retirement and looking for some peace and quiet, a home in the country with some land around it. Maybe start a garden. And maybe get a dog. A friend, his colleague Martinson, suggests a particular piece of property, which Wallander agrees would be perfect. It is on a second visit to inspect the property that he stumbles over something in the existing overgrown garden, the skeletal remains of a human hand, in An Event in Autumn, a mystery novella by Henning Mankell.

Wallander calls in Martinson, who in turn calls in a forensic team to search the property for additional bones … which they find, a complete skeleton missing one hand. The body is determined to belong to a woman. And while the bones had been on the property a very long time, at least six decades, there is evidence that she had been hung. Later the skeletal remains of a man are found; he died from blunt trauma to the head. Though it seemed unlikely anyone in the area would remember something that happened over sixty years ago, Wallander and his daughter Linda, also a police officer, begin to question the neighbors. It seems like a hopeless task, but all they need is just one person to give them a hint as to what might have happened so long ago … and why.

An Event in Autumn is a well-crafted mystery. The dynamics between Wallander and his daughter Linda are curious but probably not unusual for two members of the same family that share not only a home but also a profession, and add strain to an already tension-filled story. Relatively short and crisply written, this is an excellent example of the author's work, and one that will capture and retain the reader's interest throughout.

Special thanks to guest reviewer Betty of The Betz Review for contributing her review of An Event in Autumn.

Acknowledgment: Random House provided a copy of An Event in Autumn for this review.

An Event in Autumn

A Kurl Wallander Mystery Novella by Henning Mankell