Kennedy's Brain
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3.8 • 12 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An original and breathtaking thriller surrounding one of the most important issues of our time, from internationally acclaimed and bestselling author Henning Mankell.
When archaeologist Louise Cantor’s son Henrik is found dead in his flat, she refuses to believe it was suicide. Despite traces of sleeping tablets in his system, several clues that only a mother knows lead her to believe something more sinister took place.
However Louise soon realizes that Henrik had kept many things from her and is shocked to learn he had contracted HIV. While looking through his papers, she discovers he was obsessed with the conspiracy theory that JFK’s brain disappeared prior to the autopsy—along with the vital evidence regarding bullet exit wounds. The only lead is a letter and photograph from Henrik’s girlfriend in Mozambique.
Louise’s quest to unravel the mystery surrounding her son’s death takes her to Africa, a continent rife with disease, poverty and corruption. Struggling to cope with the oppressive heat and sickness, Louise sees fear in every face, even unexpectedly in the clinics set up by an American businessman. In Kennedy’s Brain Mankell confirms his status as a master of suspense, and delivers a timely and riveting thriller that will have readers on the edge their seats until the very end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Mankell's engaging but overly polemical stand-alone crime novel, Louise Cantor, an archeologist working in Greece, returns home to Sweden to discover her grown son, Henrik, lying dead in his own bed. Cantor, who refuses to accept the police theory that Henrik killed himself, launches her own investigation. (The book's title refers to one of the mysteries surrounding the JFK assassination, which had become a bizarre metaphor for the secretive Henrik.) In her quest for answers, Cantor journeys to Australia in search of her estranged husband; to Barcelona, where Henrik had an apartment and a surprisingly large bank account; and to Maputo, Mozambique, where she learns of the devastation wrought by poverty, AIDS and greed. Mankell, author of the wonderful Kurt Wallender series (Faceless Killers, etc.), is a deft and imaginative plotter and an insightful observer of the human condition, but here his righteous anger over the AIDS crisis in Africa and the exploitative role of the pharmaceutical industry overshadows the mystery solving.
