Harvill £14.99 pp422

Thirteen years ago, when Henning Mankell published the first of his Inspector Wallander novels, he could not have imagined how successful they would be. In his native Sweden the series triumphed overnight, and has sold more than 20m copies worldwide. From his first appearance in Faceless Killers (1991), the fortysomething Wallander is in a bad way. He eats too many takeaways and is increasingly alcoholic since his wife left him.

Firewall, the eighth mystery in Mankell’s nine-book Wallander series, is set in the familiar treeless landscape of southern Sweden. Wallander, a sternly pensive sleuth with diabetes and incipient baldness, falls into ever more lugubrious talk of his (and humanity’s) demise. Savagery descends on his home town one night when a man is murdered while stopping to use a cash machine. Soon afterwards, a local taxi driver is killed by two teenage girls. The body count mounts as Wallander pursues his inquiries. A young man is found crushed to death in a ship’s propeller shaft. Then a girl is burnt to a cinder on a generator’s power-lines. Are the killings linked?

Gradually, Wallander uncovers a plot to undermine the world’s financial system. A group of computer hackers has tampered with cash points and other electronic money outlets in an attempt to cause havoc. Questions of responsibility and morality, of justice and democracy, are explicitly raised. Yet, overall, the book lacks the mordant comedy of the earlier Wallander procedurals, and a certain authorial weariness shows in the writing. Firewall nevertheless remains a compelling Euro-thriller, and Inspector Wallander has never been more attractively grumpy.

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