This is where things get messy. The narrative rambles over four continents. It dives back to 1863, to the exploitation of Chinese labour imported to help build the US railway system. There’s corruption in Beijing, a glimpse of Mugabe in Zimbabwe, a shooting within earshot of Trafalgar Square, and a villain who could have been designed by Edgar Wallace. This is a revenger’s tragedy and the cast of characters is enormous. Many of them wind up dead.

It has to be said, with regret, that The Man From Beijing is likely to disappoint the legions of Wallender fans around the world. This is only partly because of Wallender’s absence. More to the point, the narrative is, literally and metaphorically, all over the place. It is difficult for the reader to feel much empathy for the characters — there are too many of them, and even their suffering becomes an abstract quality, like a set of statistics. A strong central character might have rescued the novel, but Birgitta, the main viewpoint, is a wet blanket surrounded by a miasma of mild despair. Everything — her marriage, her job, her youthful politics, the Swedish legal system and human nature — has failed to come up to expectations.

Mankell clearly feels passionately about a great evil and wished to write about it. In the event, his polemical purpose overwhelms the fiction. Sometimes this is closer to a lecture than a crime thriller. To sum up, the result is a turkey, albeit a turkey with its heart in the right place. But there is one consolation for Henning Mankell’s many readers: there are reports that a new Wallender novel is on the way.

Andrew Taylor’s latest novel is Bleeding Heart Square (Penguin)

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