Should I read Faceless Killers before The Dogs of Riga?

Yes. While The Dogs of Riga works as a standalone, it builds directly on Wallander's character as established in the first book. The Latvian sections land harder if you already understand what Ystad and Swedish provincial life represent to him.

Is The Dogs of Riga the best Wallander novel?

Many readers think so. It combines the social seriousness of the series with genuine thriller momentum in a way the other books rarely match. Sidetracked is the other main candidate for the series high point.

What is the book actually about without spoilers?

Two murdered men wash ashore in Sweden. Wallander ends up in Latvia during the Soviet collapse, investigating the murder of a Latvian police officer who had helped with the original case. He discovers a conspiracy rooted in how power transitions work — or don't.

Is the Latvia setting accurate?

Mankell reportedly spent time in Latvia researching the setting, and reviewers from the region have generally praised the atmosphere as credible. The political dynamics reflect the actual tensions of the 1991-1992 transition period.

Who shouldn't read this book?

Readers who want their detective to be in control. Wallander is confused for long stretches of this book, unable to read the situation, operating on incomplete information. If you need competence porn, look elsewhere.

The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell: Summary & Discussion Questions

Summary

The Dogs of Riga is the second Kurt Wallander novel, published in 1992 and set partly in Sweden but primarily in Latvia at the moment the Soviet Union is collapsing. A life raft washes ashore on the Swedish coast carrying two dead men in expensive clothes. Ballistic analysis points east. Wallander is dispatched to Riga to cooperate with a Latvian major named Liepa — a careful, cultivated man who seems completely trustworthy. Back in Sweden. Liepa returns to Latvia and is quickly murdered. Wallander returns to Riga to find out why, and walks straight into a country being dismantled from within.

This is the most politically ambitious book in the Wallander series. Mankell uses the Soviet collapse not as background but as a moral laboratory: who collaborates, who resists, who negotiates, who simply tries to survive? The Latvian police are both victims of the old order and perpetrators of the new one, and Wallander — a provincial Swedish cop with no training in political violence — must figure out in real time who is telling him the truth. He is operating almost completely without institutional support, in a country whose language he doesn't speak, navigating a conspiracy he barely understands.

The book is structurally different from Faceless Killers. This is a thriller more than a police procedural: the pacing accelerates, the danger becomes physical rather than bureaucratic, and Wallander is genuinely in over his head. Mankell doesn't quite abandon his deliberate rhythms, but the Latvian sections crackle in a way the Ystad scenes rarely do.

The Dogs of Riga is often cited as the best entry in the Wallander series. It takes everything that makes Faceless Killers good — the social conscience, the weary realism, the unglamorous protagonist — and adds narrative urgency. Wallander doesn't just solve a crime here; he witnesses a country trying to become something new and not fully succeeding.

Key takeaways

1.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was not the clean liberation it looked like from the West. Mankell shows the institutional rot that survives regime change because the people survive it.
2.
Wallander is entirely out of his element in Latvia and doesn't pretend otherwise. His honesty about his own limitations becomes an unlikely form of competence.
3.
Trust in an environment of total institutional corruption is not a virtue — it is a liability. The novel keeps demonstrating what happens when Wallander extends it anyway.
4.
Major Liepa is one of Mankell's most fully realized secondary characters: a man who has spent his whole career navigating an impossible system and knows exactly what that has cost him.
5.
Political violence and criminal violence are treated here as the same phenomenon wearing different clothes. The distinction matters more to the perpetrators than to the dead.
6.
Wallander's isolation in a foreign country strips away everything that defines him professionally. What's left is more interesting than his normal competence.
7.
The novel argues that moral courage in a corrupt system requires not just individual bravery but the preservation of small, deliberate acts of record-keeping and witness.
8.
Liepa's wife is one of the novel's most important figures. Her choices reflect a kind of moral clarity the novel doesn't quite celebrate — because clarity in that environment has a specific cost.

Discussion questions

Use these on your own, with a book club, or as chat starters in Superbook.

1.
Wallander repeatedly places trust in people he has little rational basis for trusting. Does the novel ultimately vindicate or punish that instinct?
2.
Liepa is established as entirely trustworthy and then killed before he can be fully known. What does it mean for a detective novel to center a character we barely meet?
3.
The book is set during the Soviet collapse — a moment of historical possibility. Mankell is clearly ambivalent about what that possibility produces. Do you share his ambivalence?
4.
How does Wallander's inability to speak Latvian affect what he is able to understand about the case? Does the language barrier become a metaphor for anything larger?
5.
The Dogs of Riga asks who is responsible for a society's crimes — the individuals who commit them or the institutions that require them. Which answer does the novel favor?
6.
By the time Wallander identifies the person behind Liepa's murder, we understand the motivation. Does understanding make it more or less forgivable in the book's moral framework?
7.
Compared to Faceless Killers, this book moves faster and takes Wallander out of Sweden. Does the change of setting make the social commentary sharper or more diffuse?
8.
The novel ends with Wallander back in Ystad, fundamentally changed by what he witnessed. What specifically has changed, and what does it cost him going forward?
9.
How does Mankell use weather and landscape in Riga the way he uses it in Ystad? Is the effect the same or different?
10.
Liepa's widow makes choices in this book that require a specific reading of what her husband wanted. Do you think she interpreted him correctly?
11.
Soviet-era corruption and contemporary corruption share many structural features. How does the novel's 1992 setting resonate differently now than it might have then?
12.
If The Dogs of Riga were published today as a standalone — not a Wallander novel — would it work? What would be gained and lost?

Themes

Post-Soviet collapse Loyalty and betrayal Moral compromise Political violence Exile and identity

Frequently asked questions

Should I read Faceless Killers before The Dogs of Riga?

Yes. While The Dogs of Riga works as a standalone, it builds directly on Wallander's character as established in the first book. The Latvian sections land harder if you already understand what Ystad and Swedish provincial life represent to him.
Is The Dogs of Riga the best Wallander novel?

Many readers think so. It combines the social seriousness of the series with genuine thriller momentum in a way the other books rarely match. Sidetracked is the other main candidate for the series high point.
What is the book actually about without spoilers?

Two murdered men wash ashore in Sweden. Wallander ends up in Latvia during the Soviet collapse, investigating the murder of a Latvian police officer who had helped with the original case. He discovers a conspiracy rooted in how power transitions work — or don't.
Is the Latvia setting accurate?

Mankell reportedly spent time in Latvia researching the setting, and reviewers from the region have generally praised the atmosphere as credible. The political dynamics reflect the actual tensions of the 1991-1992 transition period.
Who shouldn't read this book?

Readers who want their detective to be in control. Wallander is confused for long stretches of this book, unable to read the situation, operating on incomplete information. If you need competence porn, look elsewhere.

About Henning Mankell

Henning Mankell was a Swedish author and playwright best known for the Kurt Wallander series, which spans ten novels and has sold over 40 million copies worldwide. Born in 1948, Mankell divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where he ran the Teatro Avenida theater company for decades. Beyond the Wallander series, he wrote standalone novels including The Man from Beijing and I Die, But the Memory Lives On. He received numerous awards including the German Crime Prize and the Glass Key. Mankell died in 2015.

More books by Henning Mankell