This is the first in Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series. It’s a competent thriller, but it clearly shows that he hadn’t yet hit his stride. Wallander comes across as a stereotypical depressed policeman: miserable because his wife has left him, out of touch with his daughter, fighting with his father, and getting drunk far too often. He is also the stereotypical highly committed policeman: working until all hours, doggedly following down leads that others had given up on, and racking up large numbers of cuts and bruises in the course of the investigation. In the end he fights against his own personal decline as much as he fights against the decay he sees creeping over Swedish society. You’re left with the impression of a capable character: one who can overcome the obstacles thrown at him. But is he really likeable? Would I have read more Wallander books if this was the first one I had picked up? Maybe not.

When I bought Sidetracked, I had no idea that Henning Mankell is Swedish, and that this is an English translation of his book. Being bilingual, I’m always a bit wary about reading translations. I’m always wondering how much of the author’s original tone is being lost. How many figures of speech just do not survive being moved out of their original tongue? What is the translator adding in order to compensate? So usually I consider a translated work to be a collaborative effort between the original author and the translator. In this case it’s Steven T. Murray, who has also translated many of Mankell’s other novels, and he does a fine job.

Inspector Kurt Wallander of the Ystad police finds himself investigating a series of brutal murders where the victims have been scalped. The victims are also rich and well-known, and so there is a lot of outside interest and pressure for him to solve the case. At the same time he has to deal with his sick father, and figure out a way to tell his girlfriend that the case will mean he’ll have to cancel their holiday. It’s these family connections that lend Sidetracked a lot of its interest. You get the impression that Wallander (and the rest of the Ystad police force) is much more than just a cop: he is a son, a father, a lover, and a friend. Despite the viciousness of the crimes, the book feels gentle and innocent. Wallander is constantly wondering how the Sweden he loves so much can produce such a deranged killer. Despite his cynicism, he genuinely believes in the goodness of his country and its people.

Although the writing is dry in places (especially at the start), this is a fascinating insight into the NSA and signals intelligence. The book doesn’t go into details about how the NSA breaks codes; recent years have seen plenty of books on codebreaking. Instead it focuses on the history of the NSA, the tough, dangerous, yet often tediously boring job of signals operators in the field, and the role that electronic intelligence gathering has played since the Second World War. But as well as notes of historical interest, Bamford has dug up an astonishing amount of inside information about incidents that security agencies and politicians would prefer stayed buried. His desciptions of incidents surrounding the lead-up to the Cuban missile crisis, and the Korean and Vietnam wars are eye-opening. He digs deeply into the question of who knew what and when, and comes up with some shocking answers. Definitely a must-read.

I used to really enjoy Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone books, but I went off them for a while in the middle of the alphabet. Somewhere around M or N she wandered away from the things I liked, focussing more on Kinsey’s past and less on her detective work. (I like my murder mysteries the way I like my Regency romances: just a shade too inventive to be labelled formulaic, but safe and predictable in tone and overall content.) With Q, Grafton and Kinsey are back on form.

Unlike most of the Grafton books, Q is for Quarry uses a real-life murder as its starting point: the unidentified body of a young woman, found in a quarry in 1969. Now, years later, Kinsey Millhone is asked to look into the murder along with the original investigating policemen. Kinsey’s sarcastic tone works nicely with the acrid personalities of the cops, both of whom are facing their own mortality. There is the usual assortment of interesting characters with undiscovered pasts, dogged legwork on Kinsey’s part, and a faintly embittered outsider’s view of social structures and functions.

At the end of the book is a note from Grafton herself, about the Jane Doe who was the genesis of the book. She explains which details she has added to the true story (the presence of a tarp, for instance) and which are original (the pattern on the victim’s trousers). She also includes a facial reconstruction, on the off chance that a reader may recognise the dead girl. The serious postscript would make a pooly written book seem tawdry, but Grafton’s prose and plotting, the sheer humanity of her characters, is not shamed.