Five years after Henning Mankell’s death, his gritty first novel makes a welcome appearance

The Swedish writer Henning Mankell did not let himself be pigeonholed. Mankell, who died in 2015 at age 67, became famous for his mystery series featuring the brooding, boozing, opera-loving Inspector Kurt Wallander; but he also wrote nonfiction, YA novels, a kids’ book and non-mystery novels that hark back to the naturalism of Emile Zola and Theodore Dreiser. It seems only right that in his later years this protean figure divided his time between two places: Sweden and Africa, where he was artistic director of a theater company in Mozambique.