Kennedy’s Brain
A Novel
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
Henning Mankell, the acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries, has put his unmistakable stamp on this gripping new thriller.
Archaeologist Louise Cantor returns home to Sweden and makes a devastating discovery: her only child, twenty-eight-year-old Henrik, dead in his bed. The police rule his death a suicide but she knows he was murdered; her quest to find out what really happened to Henrik takes her across the globe to Barcelona, where her son kept a secret apartment; Sydney, Australia, to find Aron, her estranged ex-husband and Henrik's father; and to Maputo, Mozambique, where she learns the awful truth behind an AIDS hospice. Her investigation reveals how much her son concealed from her as she uncovers the links between his death, the African AIDS epidemic, and Western pharmaceutical interests, while those who dare help her are killed off.
In the tradition of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener, Kennedy's Brain was inspired by Mankell's anger at ongoing inequities that permit a few people to have unprecedented power over the many poor Africans who have none. Already a bestseller in Europe, Kennedy's Brain is both a thrilling page-turner and a damning indictment of inhuman greed in the face of the African AIDS crisis.
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.
Customer Reviews
Slow and far fetched
Mankell is otherwise great, but this one is just depressing.