You find yourself yelling inside your head: "Don't go home!" The exemplar here is Thomas Harris's The Silence Of The Lambs and, as in that book, Mankell escalates tension through scenes in which the cop doesn't know what's awaiting him but the reader does. This is one of those crime novels in which a shady character, identified merely as "he", commits acts - here, killing three young people and a detective in apparently unrelated incidents - which the book's resident policeman then catches up with in the next chapter. The narrative device of One Step Behind is announced by the title. Close to physical collapse throughout the book, Wallander, even in a genre populated by men who have seen too much, is a police Tiresias. His illness worsens a tendency not to listen properly to witnesses, which fattens the narrative but leads him to fear he's a "bad policeman". Always heavy and dyspeptic, the inspector begins this book with a black-out while driving, which prompts medical tests and mortal terror. One Step Behind finds Wallander at risk from a serial killer, but the reader keeps fearing that the cop's own heart will attack him first.
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