Pyramid and and four other Kurt Wallander mysteries by Henning Mankell

Includes:
Wallander’s First Case
Man with the Mask
Man on the Beach
Death of the Photography
Pyramid

The five stories feature early versions of Kurt Wallander's early life as a policeman as well as paint evocative portraits of contemporary Swedish society. We get the background of how Wallander becomes a homicide detective when his neighbour is found dead in Wallander's First Case. In Man with the Mask, Wallander checks on an store on Christmas eve disrupting an attempted burglary. An unremarkable businessman is poisoned in The Man on the Beach but—in typical Mankell fashion—the case is larger, more complex and more interesting than it first appears. In, The Death of the Photographer, Simon Lamberg takes studio portraits of weddings and children, but a couple of nights each week, he uses his darkroom to distort published photographs of politicians and newsworthy people for a macabre personal scrapbook. It's a bizarre hobby, but the cause of Lamberg's brutal, apparently senseless death is an even stranger puzzle. We also see development between Wallander and his father in the Pyramid, more of a novella and the final part of the collection. All of these story help establish the melancholy Wallander seems to suffer from.

This was my first exposure to the series but I did watch some of the PBS Masterpiece Theater starring Kenneth Branagh. These are not light mysteries but I definitely enjoyed getting a taste of this series and look forward to reading more.