Unsettled by the utter stillness of the place, Hoglin begins knocking on doors. There is no answer at either the first or second door. He tries the back door. There is no answer and the door is locked as the others have been. He is getting more anxious so he peers in the windows and thinks he can see an unmoving foot. Now he feels justified in breaking a window to gain access to the home. What he sees scares him. There are two bodies that of an old woman and an old man.

Hoglin runs out of the house his heart racing. He tries to dial the emergency number but gets no signal. He races away in his car finally stopping at the main road to try his cell phone again. With a history of heart problems it is no surprise he begins to have pain even as the connection is made, and is unable to give the woman at emergency services any information. His car crashes into a truck on the highway.

The truck driver is unhurt and tries to help the stricken Hoglin but the man utters but two words, village and Hesjovallen. When questioned by the police the truck driver, visibly shaken, is of little help. He is Bosnian and speaks little Swedish. He does manage to communicate that he thinks the stricken man was trying to say the name of a place and when the police mention Hesjovallen he is able to confirm the name.

When the police reach Hesjovallen they find much more than they could imagine. Out of a total of twenty-one inhabitants, only three remain alive. Nineteen people have been slaughtered including one young boy who had been visiting relatives at the time. Even several dogs had had their throats slit. Who could possibly have done such a horrible deed, and perhaps more to the point, why?

With little to go on the police appeal to possible relatives of the villagers who all appear to be related to only three families. A judge in a nearby city, Birgitta Roslin, believes that two of the victims are the adoptive parents of her mother. She contacts the local authorities who are less than appreciative of her help, though the main local investigator, Vivi Sundburg, does interview Birgitta at length and allows her to view the house where her grandparents lived.

The story becomes much more complex reaching as far as China and Africa and back as far in the past as the nineteenth century. Birgitta is the driving force in the investigation as the police are convinced that the motive and the perpetrator are local.

Quite a departure from his Inspector Wallender series, Henning Mankell has undertaken an ambitious task in this wide reaching novel. The premise is a good one but the means to the end is circuitous. To tie his protagonist to the sources she needs to find the evidence requires some fancy footwork on the author’s part and he occasionally stumbles.

Birgitta just happens to have a good friend who has connections to China which allows her access to information she probably couldn’t have obtained otherwise. People, such as her family, that would under usual circumstances offer her help and support are unavailable and she ends up in trouble. The police in the form of Vivi Sundburg, who obviously has no love lost for Birgitta, allow her access to material that she should not have. Birgitta is on leave from her judgeship because of high blood pressure presumably brought on by stress. She goes to China, is almost killed, returns to Sweden, and is checked out by her doctor who says her blood pressure is now fine. It is all possible, but clearly improbable.

There is a good deal of history to be learned from this tale. The story of the building of the transcontinental railroad in the United States using essentially slave labor from China is eye opening. The plight of the peasant Chinese in China during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is informative as well. The story reaches into Africa particularly Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and Mozambique giving readers a mini history of the world.

We don’t get to know the characters in the book very well, but we do get some insight into Birgitta’s personality as well as that of her husband, and her good friend Karin. These are wise clever people who have some interesting insights. It would be entertaining to see them back again under different circumstances.

The Man from Beijing is an ambitious novel. The author has undertaken a large task tying disparate ideas into a cohesive whole. It is a little rough in places, involving perhaps too many coincidences for everything and everyone to end up in the right place at the right time. The essence of the plot is good enough to overlook most of that.    

--Andy Plonka