Joseph Mahon reviews Henning Mankell's final Wallander novel, The Troubled Man.

Simone de Beauvoir's mother, though dying of stomach cancer, had "a very easy death."

By contrast, Kurt Wallander, the introspective police detective in Henning Mankell's The Troubled Man, has a horrible, protracted death. The abrupt, penultimate paragraph of the novel informs us that "The shadow grew more intense. And Kurt Wallander slowly descended into a darkness that some years later transported him into the empty universe known as Alzheimer's disease."