The Return of the Dancing Master

by Henning Mankell

Book Overview

WINNER OF THE CWA GOLD DAGGER FOR SIDETRACKED Herbert Molin, a retired police officer, is living alone in a remote cottage in the vast forests of northern Sweden. He has two obsessions: one is the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400076951
• Release Date: February 2005
• Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.9" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

Keeping it Fresh

First of all,let me say I questioned the introduction of a new dectective by Mankell ..as readers of the Kurt Wallander series we have gotten to know and understand most of what makes him tick. Now we meet another police officer ,in another place with his own set of problems...cancer of the tongue obviously the most serious of these. Forget that...I should have known there was a plan here.The story takes off like a forest fire and offers us the most visual and terrifying of all of Mankell's books.I literally could not put the book down until it was finished. Get hooked, get the whole series and read this BEFORE "Before the Frost'

An examination of life within a crime drama

Henning Mankell's "The Return of the Dancing Master" is an outstanding piece of literature written in a manner that parallels its desolate, foreboding and depressing setting central and northern Sweden. Through the eyes of Mankell's main character 37 year old police officer Stefan Lindman we see a profound deliberation of life values and ideologies. Lindman a bachelor working in the southern Swedish town of Boras has been stunned to learn that the lump on his tongue has been diagnosed as a malignant lesion. Bewildered, he espies a dated newspaper in the hospital cafeteria. He reads that a former colleague Herbert Molin, a retired 76 year old had been found murdered, bullwhipped to death at his isolated cottage in the northern forests of Harjedalen. Lindman already absent on sick leave is due to start radiation therapy in 3 weeks. He becomes introspective while confronting his believed mortality and decides to escape from that reality and take a trip to Molin's locale to find out what happened. Based in a hotel in the small town of Sveg, he begins unofficially investigating the circumstances of Molin's death. He soon meets Giuseppe Larsson the local officer investigating the crime, who gives him leeway and eventually allows Lindman to become part of the investigation. Eventually it is discovered that Molin left Sweden during WW2 to join with Hitler's SS troops and always harbored strong Nazi sentiments. It was determined that the murder was retribution for horrid acts committed by Molin during the war. We also meet the murderer, Aron Silberstein, a German Jew now living in Argentina, who has vowed revenge against Molin. Shockingly during the probe, a retired and elderly neighbor of Molin's is also found murdered, killed by a shotgun blast. As the inquest goes forward Lindman and the provincial police officers become confronted with a vast network of neo-Nazis operating under the cloak of the Strong Sweden Foundation. All the while, Lindman comes in contact with older people who are coming to grips their their own mortality which forces Lindman to do the same. He also uncovers some secrets which calls into question the basis of his own ideologic beliefs. Mankell is an important new find for me as an author who goes beyond the confines of a mystery writer to provoke deep thought pertaining to the meaning of life.

Murders in Mankell's home valley!

This was the third Mankell mystery I'd read (the other two are "Die falsche Fährte", " Brannvegg", then later "Hunde von Riga") and it's fully up to par. Hard to say whether Firewall is really better. Here, as in "Firewall" (and as opposed to "Die falsche Fährte") the book takes off and flies from the beginning. The suspense builds enormously but there came a point where I doubted, with all the tangled loose threads, if Mankell could bring it to a decent ending (according to John Berger, and maybe Kafka as well, a writer should never have a specific ending in mind, just let it fall out as the writing progresses). Anyway, the book ended reasonably after all. Highly recommendable. Mankell and Donna Leon are the only mysteries I can tolerate, having read Sherlock Holmes much earlier in life.This review is based on the Norwegian translation, "Danselærerens tilbakkekomst".

Brilliant international crime novel - mordant yet seductive

I don't know what it is that has suddenly caused this rise in recognition of foreign writers, but it can only be a good thing. Jose Carlos Somoza, Boris Akunin, Karin Fossum, Carlo Lucarelli, and the Dark Wintry King of them all, Henning Mankell, who is increasingly a phenomena. His books fly off the shelves on mainland Europe, he's mobbed in the streets in his native Sweden, in Germany he apparently outsells J.K. Rowling (it's about time someone did), and half-Swedish Ruth Rendell has taken the trouble to read all the novels in their original language, admiring the fascinating procedural detail, which is just one of Mankell's strengths. He never shies from portraying the dull of aspects of routine police-work, but somehow manages to put such a spin on them as to make them interesting. And although The Return of the Dancing Master is a departure from his ever-better Kurt Wallander series - although it may as well not be, for how similar and ominously gloomy the two different protagonists are, it is just as excellent, and probably even better.Retired policeman Herbert Molin lives a hermetic existence in a lonely house in the middle of a North-Sweden forest. Whatever he's hiding from, he's eluded it for 11 years, occupying himself with his fears, his jigsaw puzzles, and his dancing. Then, one day he is found beaten and lashed, lying dead in the snow on the edge of the wood. In his house, bloody footprints pattern the floor, marking out the steps of his favourite dance, the tango.When Stefan Lindman, on sick-leave and obsessed with death having recently been diagnosed with cancer, reads of his old colleagues murder, he ventures north to the forests of Molin's retreat in order to try and find out more about who killed him, and in doing so places himself into a bleak investigation that stretches itself back to the evil acts of the second world war, and forces him to confront uncomfortable truths about his modern-day Sweden. I can well see how Mankell's books, this one in particular, may not be suited to all. The Return of the Dancing Master - this title has quickly jumped to the top of my "Favourite Book Titles" list - is a dark, bleak and intense book with a heavy, dark atmosphere. There is little sunlight to be glimpsed anywhere, literally or metaphorically. So this is not for people who like their fiction light and happy, but more melancholy and affecting.Sweden is evoked brilliantly, which is important as setting is one of the three necessary factors required in order to make a crime book effective, the other two being plot and character, where Mankell succeeds as well. The vast lonely forests of Northern Sweden contribute effectively to the bleakness (as you can tell, "bleak" is very much a watch-word here) of the book, and it is clear that Mankell has a very good handle on his country, and although is fond of it, shows us the things which worry him about modern Sweden, which he has said he thinks is a "pretty average" society. Here we are treate

Gritty Reading, Terrific, but Frightening Story

Boras (a city in Sweden) detective Stefan Lindman has been diagnosed as having cancer on his tongue and he takes sick leave to have radiotherapy. Then he learns that Herbert Molin, a former colleague who retired eleven years earlier has been murdered. Molin had been living a lonely existence in the middle of a Northern forest, doing his jigsaw puzzles and dancing. He was found tied up and dead in the snow. He'd been tortured, his back whipped, his feet flayed, and the killer left a clue, bloody footprints in the house in the pattern of Molin's favorite dance, the tango. Though Molin had retired to the far north and Boras is in the south, that doesn't stop Lindman from driving up and offering what help he can to Giuseppe Larrson, the officer running the investigation. Larrson is a laid-back, happily married local police officer who easily admits that he doesn't have any idea what's going on. Struggling to face up to his own mortality while investigating, Lindman talks to Molin's neighbor, then the neighbor is murdered in a similar fashion, though not quite as brutally. The differences in the murders points to two suspects. The original killer, we learn, is a foreigner who is avenging the murder of his father, but he is only interested in killing the man responsible. The second murder has the first killer on the same quest as Lindman. Finding the second killer.Lindman's investigation leads back to evil deeds done during World War II and forces Lindman to face uncomfortable truths about his country.The translation here was so well done, that I didn't notice it. What I did notice, however, were the very believable people on Mr. Mankell's pages, the wonderful description of the sometimes harsh environment, and the message Mankell delivers in this rather frightening novel.Reviewed by Judith Ann Cole