DEPTHS

Henning Mankell (Harvill Secker £16.99)

Mankell says of this psychological thriller: "This story takes place in a borderland between reality and my own invention." His protagonist, Lars Tobiasson-Swartman, a naval hydrographic engineer, plumbs the depths as he redraws the secret eastern coastal routes of the archipelago so that the larger Swedish battleships, threatened by warring German and the Russian fleets in 1914, can travel safely.

Obsessed by calculations of the distances between seas as much as between the precise location of every human being, his "dream is to discover the greatest depth of all". However, he is unaware that the charts he is mapping will lead to chaos.

In a departure from his successful Inspector Wallander Mysteries, Mankell takes his new troubled protagonist into murky waters.

A control freak, Lars is obsessed by all kinds of measurements - depth, tonnage and armaments. In times of stress he turns, not to the memory of the scent of his wife, but to the reassuring weight of his sounding lead against his chest.

Then he finds a young woman barely subsisting on an isolated skerry, whose husband drowned in his own fishing nets; spellbound, he keeps coming back to her.

Becoming increasingly unstable, enmeshed in lies, deceptions and murder, he finds his transactions with the world slipping further and further away from him.

Meanwhile his wife, isolated in her empty flat in Stockholm, seeks comfort with her china figurines, reminding one of Tennessee Williams's lonely girl in his play The Glass Menagerie. Mankell, with his short chapters, his cold "no-frill voice", the tangible icy scenes, frozen seas and snow, has created a disturbing tale of a man able to measure the depth of the seas but unable to find "the navigable channels inside himself".