"The White Lioness" by Henning Mankell

The White Lioness by Henning Mankell

A provincial murder mystery with international intrigue, conspiracy and some very bad characters. I wrote a bit about this earlier. In the last half of the book I came across a couple of paragraphs that made an impact on me. This book is set in the early 1990's, the period after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, but before he was elected President, when apartheid was on its' way out.

On page 298 Kurt Wallander's old acquaintance Widen tells him about his experience in South Africa.

"The way those blacks were treated. I was ashamed. It was their country, but they were forced to go around cap in hand, apologising for their existence. I've never seen anything like it and I'll never forget it."

On page 308 Kurt is telling his daughter about the first black African assassin.

"I don't know. I sometimes felt I'd made some kind of contact with him. But then he slipped away again. I don't know what he was thinking deep down. He was a remarkable man, very complicated. If that's how you get when you live in South Africa, it must be country you wouldn't want to send your worst enemy to."

A couple paragraphs later, comes this little insight, unrelated to the whole African thing. Kurt's daughter speaks, and he responds.

"That's not what I mean," she said. "I'd like to do something nobody else can do."
"That's not the kind of thing you can plan in advance," Wallander said. "That just happens. When it happens."

There are some things you can do with training and talent that are exceptional, but there are others where you just have to be in right place at the right time and then act on the opportunity.

On page 322 the villain Konovalenko plans his least violent act.

But he also wanted to give Wallander a different picture of the circumstances, something threatening that would leave no doubt as to what he was prepared to do. Cropped female hair smells of death and ruin, he thought. He's a policeman, he'll get the picture.

Women's hair. What a strange thing. Why is long hair so attractive? I can understand that some women cut it because it's a hassle to take care of. Women can be very attractive even with short hair. So what's the big deal? There is something going on here deep in the mammalian brain. Probably any number of graduate theses written about it. I have vague ideas, but none are what you would call outstanding.

Update November 2015. Replaced picture of lioness.
Update December 2016 replaced image of book cover.