I just finished this, and, frankly, if I thought this was as good as Mankell can deliver, I wouldn't bother reading anything else of his. As noted in other reviews, It starts out very well, stumbles a few time, then veers off into a tendentious discussion of the politics of modern China, neo-colonialism, and revisionist history of Africa. At one point a character delivers a speech to an assembly of China's movers and shakers, and we get the whole speech, page after page of it. It's good, but who needs it? Mankell does a convincing job of presenting China as a setting, but to do that, he has to drop his basic murder-mystery story to establish China as an emerging power center and to explain the existence of one Chinese man who may have a reason to commit the original murder.
The book started to go sideways for me in the first few pages (SPOILER ALERT!): the murder is discovered in rural isolation by a lone individual without a cell phone, and Mankell has to invoke some fairly creaky (and visible) plot mechanics to bring the murder to the attention of the police. Later in the story, crucial characters are conveniently rubbed out by faceless snipers with high-powered rifles. Characters like those pop up, then disappear again, while the reader is left wondering what's going on with Vivi, the interesting woman police chief back in Sweden. We never find out. The big murder scene just seems to be Mankell's means to get us into a discussion of Chinese politics.
Get more detail about The Man from Beijing.
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