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Shop nowThe Return of the Dancing Master
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreWhen retired policeman Herbert Molin is found brutally slaughtered on his remote farm in the northern forests of Sweden, police find strange tracks in the snow, as if someone had been practicing the tango. Stefan Lindman, a young police officer recently diagnosed with mouth cancer, decides to investigate the murder of his former colleague but is soon enmeshed in a mystifying case with no witnesses and no apparent motives. Terrified of the disease that could take his life, Lindman becomes more and more reckless as he unearths the chilling links between Molin’s death and an underground neo-Nazi network that runs further and deeper than he could ever have imagined.
Henning Mankell (1948–2015) was Sweden’s most-read author worldwide. His novels, which include the bestselling Kurt Wallander mysteries, have been translated into thirty-seven languages with more than thirty million copies in print worldwide. He has received the Crime Writers’ Association’s Macallan Gold Dagger and the German Tolerance Prize and has been a three-time finalist for the Los Angeles Times Mystery/Thriller Book Prize.
Grover Gardner is an award-winning narrator with over a thousand titles to his credit. Named one of the “Best Voices of the Century” and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR:
Laurie Thompson is the distinguished translator of novels by Henning Mankell and Hakan Nesser. He was editor of Swedish Book Review between 1983 and 2002.
Reviews
“Violence strikes with quick and shocking ferocity…The story has a density that demands—and rewards—intellectual movement.”
“Mankell weaves a mournful spell through all his mysteries by adopting a calm, dispassionate tone that artfully underlines an abiding humanism for psychic as well as physical suffering…Sends a shiver down the spine.”
“Delightfully morbid…Steering between literature and suspense, [Mankell’s] measured prose recalls those gloomy precisionists Peter Handke and Patricia Highsmith.”
“Irrestible…[Mankell] is a master at constructing gripping, intricately plotted police procedurals with a strong dose of social commentary…The appeal…[is] the sheer brutal imaginativeness of the crimes.”
“Henning Mankell is by far the best writer of police mysteries today. He is in the great tradition of those whose work transcends their chosen genre to become thrilling and moral literature.”
“The characters drawn by Henning Mankell are so real you can hear them breathe…Grover Gardner is unemotional and straightforward as he narrates Mankell’s terse descriptions and painstakingly precise details. Gardner is extremely affecting without becoming melodramatic, especially as Lindman ponders his own mortality…Gardner’s performance transcends the dreary, sunless Swedish landscape, bringing just the right tone to Mankell’s gritty police procedural.”
“As always, Mankell tells somber, deeply pessimistic stories about widespread hatred lurking below the multicultural surface, but at the same time, he never fails to find a rich vein of humanity deep within the perpetually furrowed brows of his troubled cops.”
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