super spannend: Ich habe das Buch von einem Bekannten empfohlen bekommen. Ich habe das ganze WE damit verbracht, es zu lesen und es ist einfach super spannend! Kann ich absolut empfehlen. Was mir besonders daran gefällt, sind die Beschreibungen über die Apartheid und wie die Buren denken. So ist es nämlich wirklich :-( Leider. Sehr wahrheitsgetreu. Ich finde die Zufälle nicht so unrealistisch, wenn man gerade das mit dem Polonium-Krimi so mitkriegt und vergleicht.
Und ich finde es bei Büchern auch immer sehr gut, wenn man sich mit den Orten, die darin vorkommen identifizieren kann. Wenn man also weiss wo der Signal Hill ist oder schon mal in Pretoria war.

The White Lioness is book number three in Mankell's series of crime novels Ystad detective featuring Kurt Wallander. I was really iffy on whether or not I would read this one, since it seemed more like a span-the-globe type of mystery, but I stuck with it and was happily rewarded.

The action begins when an estate agent goes out to look at a house for sale and loses her way on the road. Stopping to ask for directions at a farmhouse was the last thing she ever did. Called in to investigate her disappearance (and ultimately her death), Wallander and his team had no idea that their search for a killer would take them across the world to South Africa (the year is 1992), where a small cabal was planning a major assassination which its members hoped would set events in motion to stop the plans for disassembling the policy of apartheid in that country. This is one of those novels where you know who the killer is pretty much right away, and you're just watching to see how Wallander and his team figure it out.

Well written, The White Lioness takes place in two separate settings, but the story is very neatly tied together. The characters are realistically drawn -- especially the character of Konovalenko, who makes for an excellent bad guy. I liked this one much better than the previous series entry (Dogs of Riga). I'd definitely recommend this one to fans of Mankell, to those who like Scandinavian mysteries (which, in my mind, are simply excellent), and to those readers who want a mystery novel that is engrossing. Fans of police procedurals will enjoy this book and this series. ( )

http://pergelator.blogspot.com/2009/0...
http://pergelator.blogspot.com/2009/01/books.html ( )

Third in the Kurt Wallander, police detective in Ystad, Sweden series. This was a big juicy detective story with underlying political intrigues, beginning with the murder of a Swedish real estate agent and ending with a plot to assassinate Nelson Mandela as South Africa was approaching the end of apartheid. Quite a wide stretch between the two, but plausibly done. Wallander was up to his old solo he-man tricks and the book was full of the usual Swedish melancholia, but I still raced through the book and found it hard to put down. ( )

Kurt Wallander - He works tirelessly, eats badly and drinks the nights away in a lonely, neglected flat. Still, he tackles some pretty incredible cases -- An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, victims of violence beyond reason. . . a teenage girl douses herself in gasoline and set herself aflame. The next day Sweden's former Minister of Justice has been axed to death and scalped in a murder that has the obvious markings of a demented serial killer… four nuns and an unidentified fifth woman are found with their throats slit in an Algerian convent, while in Sweden, a birdwatcher is skewered to death in a pit of carefully sharpened bamboo poles… a Swedish housewife is murdered execution-style in a string of events that uncovers a plot to assassinate Nelson Mandela involving the South African secret service and a ruthless ex-KGB agent… an old acquaintance of Wallander’s, a solicitor, who is tied to an enigmatic business tycoon hiding behind an entourage of brusque secretaries and tight security, turns up dead, shot three times after his father dies in a traffic accident (or was it an accident?). . . In woodland outside Ystad, the police make an horrific discovery: a severed head, and hands locked together in an attitude of prayer. A Bible lies at the victim's side, the pages marked with handwritten corrections. A string of macabre incidents, including attacks on domestic animals, has been taking place, a group of religious extremists who are bent on punishing the world's sinners. … On Midsummer's Eve, three friends gather in a secluded meadow in Sweden. In the beautifully clear twilight, they don costumes and begin a secret role-play. But an uninvited guest soon brings their performance to a gruesome conclusion. His approach is careful; his aim is perfect. Three bullets, three corpses… An unknown killer is on the loose, and their only lead is a photograph of a strange woman no one in Sweden seems to know…A life raft washes ashore in Skane, Sweden, carrying two dean men in expensive suits, shot gangland-style. It is discovered that the men were Eastern European criminals… A man stops at an ATM during his evening walk and inexplicably falls dead to the ground. Two teenage girls brutally murder a taxi driver They are quickly apprehended, shocking local policemen with their complete lack of remorse. One girl escapes police custody and disappears without a trace. A few days later a blackout cuts power to a large swath of the country When a serviceman arrives at the malfunctioning power substation, he makes a grisly discovery… a shadowy group of anarchic terrorists, hidden by the anonymity of cyberspace. . . and we haven't even gotten to Kurt Wallander's personal issues! ( )