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Title details for The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell - Available

The Man from Beijing

by Henning Mankell
Laurie Thompson
Audiobook
7 of 7 copies available
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7 of 7 copies available
The acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries, writing at the height of his powers, now gives us an electrifying stand-alone global thriller.
January 2006. In the Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen, nineteen people have been massacred. The only clue is a red ribbon found at the scene.
Judge Birgitta Roslin has particular reason to be shocked: Her grandparents, the Andréns, are among the victims, and Birgitta soon learns that an Andrén family in Nevada has also been murdered. She then discovers the nineteenth-century diary of an Andrén ancestor—a gang master on the American transcontinental railway—that describes brutal treatment of Chinese slave workers. The police insist that only a lunatic could have committed the Hesjövallen murders, but Birgitta is determined to uncover what she now suspects is a more complicated truth.
The investigation leads to the highest echelons of power in present-day Beijing, and to Zimbabwe and Mozambique. But the narrative also takes us back 150 years into the depths of the slave trade between China and the United States—a history that will ensnare Birgitta as she draws ever closer to solving the Hesjövallen murders.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    February 16, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307712387
      • File size: 444465 KB
      • Duration: 15:25:58

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Was there a narrator in this audiobook? I can barely remember. And I mean that as the highest compliment. Rosalyn Landor is so in sync with Mankell's stand-alone thriller--so measured, nuanced, selfless--that it's as if the book were downloaded directly to one's brain rather than delivered through an intermediary. There is absolutely no showiness to her performance, and her characterizations are subtle but distinctive. Landor's gifts keep one alert and ever apprehensive in a story that begins in Sweden with the horrifying slaughter of an entire town of people and reaches in surprising directions across continents--to Nevada and China and Africa and London--as well as 150 years of time. With Landor in utter control, one is never in danger of wandering away. M.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 21, 2009
      A massacre in the remote Swedish village of Hesjövallen propels this complex, if diffuse, stand-alone thriller from Mankell (The Pyramid
      ). Judge Birgitta Roslin, whose mother grew up in the village, comes across diaries from the house of one of the 19 mostly elderly victims kept by Jan Andrén, an immigrant ancestor of Roslin's. The diaries cover Andrén's time as a foreman on the building of the transcontinental railroad in the United States. An extended flashback charts the journey of a railroad worker, San, who was kidnapped in China and shipped to America in 1863. After finding evidence linking a mysterious Chinese man to the Hesjövallen murders, Roslin travels to Beijing, suspecting that the motive for the horrific crime is rooted in the past. While each section, ranging in setting from the bleak frozen landscape of northern Sweden to modern-day China bursting onto the global playing field, compels, the parts don't add up to a fully satisfying whole. Author tour.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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