First published: USA 2003

Original language: English

This guy called Widdoes is teaching two nights creative writing at Attica State Prison in between teaching days at the local High. He sets his culturally diverse class a task to write something about themselves. Along with the predictable vents berating the justice system for incarcerating the innocent author-cons, one story is very, very different…

First published: Great Britain 2004

Original language: English

On his sixteenth birthday in 1977, Peter Hithersay is told by his mother that his father is not Rodney, the kind and stoically failed artist-turned-designer of wedding invitations to whom she has been married to for the past fifteen years, but a young East German dissident she met for one night when visiting Leipzig as a young girl to compete in a Bach choral festival. Peter is immediately transformed from the typical English public schoolboy he thought he had been into a German boy teased and bullied for his unpatriotic parentage when he returns to the same public school (perhaps Winchester) in the wake of this birthday revelation. The only thing he carries over from his past is a devotion to his ‘No. 1 hero’ Sir Bedevere, the last Knight of the Round Table to whom the dying King Arthur had entrusted his sword: “He loved the story and sometimes wished he might come across a dragon-threatened damsel so that he could display a courage which his surface hid.”

First published: 1998

Original language: Swedish

Translated by: Ebba Segerberg

Firewall is the first Henning Mankell thriller I’ve read, although I discover it was his last book to star Kurt Wallander as the detective hero - in its last few pages the way is set for Wallander’s daughter Linda to take over the lead in subsequent stories of the series.

As it happens, I don’t mind starting at the end of a detective series like this and then, if sufficiently struck, tracking back through the earlier works, often in descending date order, like a blog.

And in the case of Mankell and Wallander, I have certainly been struck enough to want to read more their earlier exploits, in very near, possibly even immediate, future.