In one key section involving images, the words "picture" and "photograph" are relentlessly interchanged for several pages, where a native English novelist might take more risks with the thesaurus.
Also, while Ebba Sebberberg's translation is doubtless faithful to the Swedish, it could use more infidelity to the basic vocabulary of English. The mystery of Wallander's medical problem will be solved instantly by the average hypochondriac. Other strategies for constructing suspense are less successful. Some of the details of cop bureaucracy are familiar from English police procedurals but the differences in the Scandinavian system (for example, the hostility between police and the state prosecutors) is fresher and there's the constant possibility that one of Wallander's own colleagues is a criminal. Though the investigation is consistently too slow to nab the psychopath, Mankell's detailed description of the pursuit is the book's main pleasure, apart from its skill in winding up our anxiety. 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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