The Dogs of Riga (Swedish: Hundarna i Riga) was published by Ordfront in 1992 and is the second Wallander novel. A rubber life raft containing two murdered men — shot execution-style — washes up on the Swedish coast. The investigation leads Wallander to Riga, Latvia, which in 1992 is a newly independent nation still controlled by former Soviet security services, where corruption and political violence are endemic.
The novel extends Mankell’s social vision beyond Sweden: if Faceless Killers diagnosed the illness of the Swedish welfare state, The Dogs of Riga addresses the broader European crisis of the post-Cold War period — the chaos, corruption, and violence that followed the collapse of Soviet power. Wallander, accustomed to the orderly (if imperfect) procedures of Swedish policing, finds himself in a world where the police are themselves criminals, where justice is a meaningless concept, and where his own life is in constant danger.
Mankell based the novel on research trips to Latvia and the Baltic states in the early 1990s, and his depiction of the transitional period — the power vacuum, the recycling of communist-era elites into new capitalist roles, the desperation of ordinary people — has documentary authority. The novel also deepens Wallander’s character: his brief affair with a Latvian woman, his sense of being out of his depth, and his recognition that Swedish provincialism has left him unprepared for the realities of the wider world all add complexity to the portrait.
Collecting The Dogs of Riga
First Swedish edition (Ordfront, Stockholm, 1992): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First Swedish edition: $75–$200
- First English edition (New Press, 2001): $30–$75
- First UK edition (Harvill, 2001): $20–$50