Why a Booktrail?
1991: Wallander heads to Riga on his latest case
The Dogs of Riga
What you need to know before your trail
Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off. A few days later a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead.
The dead men were criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But what appears to be an open-and-shut case soon takes on a far more sinister aspect. Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea, to Riga in Latvia, where he is plunged into a frozen, alien world of police surveillance, scarcely veiled threats, and lies.
Doomed always to be one step behind the shadowy figures he pursues, only Wallander’s obstinate desire to see that justice is done brings the truth to light.
Locations
Reset- Sweden - Ystad
- A: Ystad - harbour
- B: Ystad Policestation
- C: Ystad - Train station
- Latvia - Riga
- D: Riga harbour
- E: Riga - Police
- F: Verman's Park
- G: Skārņu street
Travel Guide
Ystad
This is a look at Sweden and the Baltic countries at a very interesting time in history. The fall of communism and the consequent increase in Swedish immigration and asylum seekers are themes in the Wallander books and Latvian links are the main subject in this book.
The new breed of crime rising in the early ‘90s in Sweden however continues to shock Wallander and makes him uncertain whether he should even working in the police. This case, when a Latvian policeman investigating a crime in Sweden ends up murdered, becomes Wallander’s concern.
Latvia – Riga
Latvia surprises him
“Riga is full of contrasts, he thought. Everything I see, and think I’m beginning to understand, is immediately followed by its opposite. Unpainted high-rise buildings soar above highly decorated, but decrepit blocks of flat built before the war. Huge esplanades end up either as narrow alleys or as splendid squares – the Cold War parade grounds of grey concrete and granite monuments.”
Riga is a shadowy, dangerous, corrupt, gray, Soviet-controlled landscape where the waters as well as the political landscape has been muddied and where Wallander finds the police forced divided, a community broken and a very different landscape for him to investigate a complex matter.
Streetview Maps
B) Sweden - Ystad - Police station
F) Latvia - Riga - Skarnu Street
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Dogs of Riga
Destination : Ystad, Riga Author/Guide: Henning Mankell Departure Time: 1990s
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