The Dogs of Riga and the Rocky Ridge Hat

The knitting: the Rocky Ridge Hat by Knox Mountain Knit Co.

The novel: The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell, translated by Laurie Thompson

First up, this fun hat!  

It's written for DK or light worsted weight yarn, and this time I held 2 strands of fingering weight yarn that I got from a friend's destash last summer.  I'm not sure of the fiber content, but I feel like there's a lot of cotton and bamboo in there.  The project took almost all of the yarn, so that's one more item out of my stash.  I made it as a birthday present for one of my sisters, and she reported back that she loved it but the fit was a bit too slouchy.  I think a soak and a trip through a dryer might help, or I could run some elastic through the brim.  

My sister's plan is to grow her hair out so the hat will fit more snugly.

My family is made up entirely of good sports about my knitted gifts.

I love these lines!

On to the novel.

This took me forever to finish because I would read no more than 5 pages and fall asleep.  I understand that this is something that will happen when you read in bed at the end of the day, but this book did not hold my attention and I don't know why.  I've been really excited to re-read the Wallander books in order of publication, and I think The Dogs of Riga was one of the last ones I could find the last time I read through the series.  I was excited at the time because this is the book in which Wallander meets Baiba Liepa, and she's featured in other stories.  Maybe that held my interest last time.  This time, I felt almost nothing!  The book is almost nonstop intrigue, corruption, duplicity, secrecy, smuggling, secret nighttime meetings, and the constant surveillance of corrupt forces.  Maybe it wore me out?

The novel opens with a life raft holding two bodies washing up to shore in Sweden.  When Wallander's office discovers the victims are Latvian, a Major Liepa comes from Latvia to investigate.  Then the life raft goes missing!  Then some things happen that I don't remember even though I took notes.  The major and Wallander bond a little, he goes back home and gets murdered, and then Wallander goes to Latvia.  He meets 2 majors, discovers life Over There is different, meets some resistance people under very dramatic and secretive circumstances, falls in love with Baiba, and goes home.  

I like how the colors on the cover sort of match the project. 
That gray pom pom glows like the miserable winter sun over Skane.

There are a lot of dinners, interviews, and conversations that are supposed to be very tense and layered with meaning.  Wallander re-examines the way he views the world and is shaken to his core into becoming a different person.  I pass out like I've taken cold medicine.

But then! He goes back!  He sneaks in with a fake passport after getting some coded messages!  There is a gun battle! Secondary characters die!  He's on the run and in hiding and there are communications through different people!  Who can you trust?! Where do you sleep?!  What if tense things are happening and you need to go to the bathroom?!

Truly, this is one of two things I remember from the last time I read the book (the first one being the introduction of the character of Baiba): Wallander poops in a trashcan in a file room.

If you've ever read a book or watched a movie where characters are constantly moving from one tense situation to another and you've complained that they never go to the bathroom or get sleep deprived or hungry....that's entirely your business, I guess.  I don't feel that way.  As much as I enjoy descriptions of meals in writing, I would love to skip over the many references to Wallander's nervous stomach in these books.  But alas, this is the book where he has 1 hour in a labyrinthine file room to find documentation that will expose a corrupt police major as the head of some smuggling ring (but which major?  Do you care? I could not), but he has to go potty and can't find a bathroom--again, labyrinthine filing room not organized in alphabetical or chronological order.  Truly a nightmare.  The horrors of a corrupt police force are limitless--and so he goes in a trashcan.  

This was not featured in the Masterpiece Mystery series featuring Kenneth Branagh, and I don't think there were any book purists clamoring for that inclusion.

He finds the file, almost gives it to the wrong person, there is another shootout on top of a building, breaks his hand, goes home through Helsinki because the Nordic countries didn't have passport controls in the early 1990s, and is a changed man.

 

Maybe this puts Wallander on the path of being Tired and Disillusioned Detective, moving him away from Angry and Sometimes Rash Detective.  He's always methodical, and working toward discovering the clues he knows he's missing, and this novel shows him moving toward something else.  In Faceless Killers, he is barely entering into a world without his marriage and into the phase of life where he has to start the process of seeking home health visits to manage his father's illness.  Now he's more accustomed to those parts of his life, but he frequently wonders what his friend and colleague Rydberg would say or do.  He still doesn't know how to relate to his daughter, and the police office hasn't figured out who is leaking information to the press.  There's more to learn, and there's always the next book.