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One Step Behind by Henning Mankell
Published by Vintage in 2003

It is Midsummer's Eve, three young friends gather in a wood. In the still-sunlit, Scandanavian dusk, they don costumes joyfully to enact - or so it appears to an unseen observer - a kind of masque. The hidden watcher soon brings their performance to an end. His approach is careful; his aim is perfect - three bullets, three corpses. The murderer, then, carefully photographs the grisly tableau. The Ystad police station, meanwhile, is experiencing a summer lull, indeed Inspector Wallander is at last at liberty to attend to - albeit reluctantly - his deteriorating health, but his peace of mind is shattered when one of his colleagues is murdered. An unknown killer, seen by no-one, is on the loose, and the police's only lead is a photograph of three dead young people in costume. Forced to dig more deeply than he would have wanted into the personal life of one of his colleagues, Wallander's investigation reveals something none of his team could ever have imagined. However, they remain tantalisingly, terrifyingly one step behind the lethal progress of a killer Wallander would have to suppose was deranged if his methods were not so meticulous and his victims so clinically targeted.

‘The most impressive new voice in the genre since Ian Rankin’ Guardian

'Wallander remains one of the most impressive and credible creations of crime fiction today' The Times

‘Mankell is a master of the genre’ Telegraph

About the Author
Henning Mankell was born in Stockholm in 1948.
In 15 years, he has published nine novels in his Inspector Kurt Wallender series. Only five of the series have been translated into English and they have been published out of sequence. They have been bestsellers on the Continent, translated into 19 languages, with four of them slated to be movies. In 2001 Mankell won the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger for Fiction.

Other books in the Kurt Wallender series
Before the Frost
Dogs of Riga
Fifth Woman
Firewall
White Lioness