The Dogs of Riga

A Kurt Wallander Mystery

By: Henning Mankell, Laurie Thompson - translator

Narrated by: Dick Hill

On the Swedish coastline, the bodies of two victims of grisly torture and cold execution are discovered in a life raft. With no witnesses, no motives, and no crime scene, Detective Kurt Wallander is frustrated and uncertain that he has the ability to solve a case as mysterious as it is heinous. After the victims are traced to the Baltic state of Latvia, a country gripped by the upheaval of Soviet disintegration, Major Liepa of the Riga police takes over the investigation.

Thinking his work is done, Wallander slips back into his routine, until he is suddenly called to Riga and plunged into an alien world - in which shadows are everywhere, everything is watched, and old regimes will do anything to stay alive.

More mayhem? Download Faceless Killers: A Kurt Wallander Mystery (Unabridged).©1992 Henning Mankell; 2001 Laurie Thompson (P)2006 Blackstone Audio Inc.

Critic reviews

"The writing is spare, the characterization deft, the atmosphere strong, and the suspense overwhelming." (Times Literary Supplement)
"Apart from his uncommon skill at devising dense, multilayered plots, Mankell's forte is matching mood to setting and subject." (New York Times Book Review)
"Wallander's introspection and self-doubt make him compellingly real, and his efforts to find out what happened to those men on the life raft makes for riveting reading." (Publishers Weekly)

The Best of the Wallander Books I Listened to.

This is my second of the first three in the Henning Mankell / Kurt Wallander series. This one is actually the best of the first three by a decent margin.

I went ahead and purchased one of Audible's package deals which included the first three books in this series all at once.

As I said with my first review of "Faceless Killers", while this is definitely an improvement, it's still nothing great. Likewise, the narrator, Dick Hill was good, but he is so "white-bread", he's not the perfect fit here.

Granted, overall, this one is not bad, three Mankell / Wallander books is enough for me.

Complex and intriguing

The narration was quite well done except for a couple of squeeky women and the story kept me interested.

Strange accents

Strange accents, It made Wallander sound less likeable. I didn’t care for the voice actor’s interpretation.

Wallander-The Dogs of Riga

I really love a good mystery and especially those in the Scandinavian countries and England. But seriously Wallander has to stop being sick and tired in every book. He is in his forties. I read this book out of order so I know he is moving toward diabetes but seriously take better care and find something else to work through.

Horrible narrator

A pretty boring book made even worse by the narrator. And the Swedish police force does not exactly look intelligent from this story.