Sidetracked: Kurt Wallander Mankell, Henning and Murray, Steven T

A teenage girl self-immolates in a rapeseed field. A former justice minister is murdered and scalped at his daughter's party. Two seemingly unrelated horrors land on Detective Kurt Wallander's desk in the middle of a Swedish summer, when the whole country should be on holiday. But Wallander is distracted — his diabetes diagnosis, his strained relationship with his daughter, the oppressive heat — and the case sprawls into something darker than he imagined. Henning Mankell writes crime fiction that doesn't flinch: the violence is brutal, the motivations tangled, and Wallander himself is tired, flawed, and deeply human. This is the fifth Wallander novel, where Sweden's social fabric starts to tear at the edges, and one detective tries to hold the seams together long enough to catch a killer.