305. The Dogs of Riga
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Henning Mankell
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Suspense, Foreign
326 pages, published April 13, 2004
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
The Dogs of Riga is the second book in the Kurt Wallander Detective series and takes place in Sweden during 1991. A few days after Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off, a life raft washes up on a beach containing two dead men, dressed in expensive suits. In his pursuit of a solution to this case, Wallander finds himself in Riga, Latvia where he is plunged into a world of corruption and intrigue.
Quotes
“He was so excessively polite that Wallendar suspected he had endured many humiliations in his life.”
“The experience he’d gained during his years in the police force had given him this unambiguous answer: there are no murderers. Only ordinary people who commit murder.”
“I’m a religious man,” he said. “I don’t believe in a particular God, but even so one can have a faith, something beyond the limits of rationality. Marxism has a large element of built-in faith, although it claims to be a science and not merely an ideology. This is my first visit to the West: until now I have only been able to go to the Soviet Union or Poland or the Baltic states. In your country I see an abundance of material things. It seems to be unlimited. But there’s a difference between our countries that is also a similarity. Both are poor. You see, poverty has different
faces. We lack the abundance that you have, and we don’t have the freedom of choice. In your country I detect a kind of poverty, which is that you do not need to fight for your survival. For me the struggle has a religious dimension, and I would not want to exchange that for your abundance.” “I know paradise has many gates, just as hell does. One has to learn to distinguish between them, or one is lost.”
“We live in an age when the mice are hunting the cats…nobody knows who are the mice and who the cats.”
My Take
Having just read the short Wallander book An Event in Autumn and enjoyed it, I was looking forward to another installment featuring the cynical Swedish inspector. I liked The Dogs of Riga and appreciated the strong writing by Henning Mankell as well as the interesting locale of Latvia (I place I knew little about). However, I wasn’t captivated by it. I’ll try another Wallander and see if I like the next one better.
