Product Description

When archaeologist Louise Cantor's son Henrik is found dead in his flat, she refuses to believe it was suicide. Clues that only a mother could detect lead her to believe something more sinister took place. Henrik had kept many things back from her and she is shocked to learn he had contracted HIV. While looking through his bundles of papers, she discovers he was obsessed with the conspiracy theory that JFK's brain disappeared prior to the autopsy - along with the vital evidence regarding bullet exit wounds. The only lead is a letter and photograph from Henrik's girlfriend in Mozambique. Louise's quest to unravel the mystery surrounding her son's death takes her to Africa; a continent rife with disease, poverty and corruption. Struggling to cope with sickness and the oppressive heat, Louise sees fear in every face, even unexpectedly in the patients at the clinics set up by an American businessman. In "Kennedy's Brain" Mankell confirms his status as a master of suspense, and delivers a timely and riveting thriller which will have readers on the edge of their seats until the very end.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #400103 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Maxim Jakubowski, The Bookseller
'Fast-paced thriller ... a timely, tightly knit plot.'

Financial Times
'Less penetrating (than Le Carre's The Constant Gardener) but more meditative, and leaves room for a hard-nosed sequel.'

Daily Sport
`This is a finely-crafted thriller you'd expect from Mankell, and the powerful social comment you wouldn't.'

Customer Reviews

Henning Mankell - Kennedy's Brain
When archaeologist Louise Cantor's son, Henrik, is found dead in his bed in Stockholm, she refuses to accept the police's verdict of suicide. Of course, this is a mystery novel, so the reader, based on previous experience of such affairs, feels wise to side with her. Louise gives up her commitments to a dig in Greece, and embarks upon a messy, mother's-grief-fuelled quest to find out the truth. It's a quest that will lead her back to Henrik's enigmatic, almost hermetic father, to Spain, and then to the AIDs-riddled communities of Mozambique, where a mysterious benefactor is funding help efforts. On the way there, she must contend with the puzzle thrown up by Henrik's extensive clippings and investigations into the conspiracy concerning president Kennedy's missing brain.

Kennedy's Brain is a very odd chestnut. Louise's somewhat messy but nobly-motivated questing proves a good metaphor for the whole book, in fact: motivated by righteous anger but executed with a bit of a muddle.

Mankell has always had an eccentric style, and with the Wallander stories and his occasional standalones, he has always plotted so superbly and created such engaging characters that that eccentricity works well with those strengths. Here, though, something's off. The plotting is in fact a bit of a muddle, and the atmosphere doesn't quite work. Louise's intense grief is supposed to arouse, one supposes, empathy and drive, but instead it bogs things down. The constant protestations of grief get tiresome, and rather than create urgency they almost overwhelm to the point of catalepsy. The plot kicks along in starts, somewhat perfunctorily at times, not feeling particularly fleshed out in terms of what has actually happened. Yes, he perfectly creates the sense of some kind of malevolence, and eventually we find out what that is more specifically, but there's little detail. Especially concerning a character's disappearance which seems odd from the very page it happens: thrown in just to give Louise something more to puzzle over but which increasingly seems to go nowhere.

At one point, one character says of another: "he could sometimes be a bit high-flown, but he really meant it", and that also sums up this book very well. Occasionally the prose is high-flown (Mankell is a great one for planting melodramatic thoughts and scripting high-flown dialogue), some of the plotting is a little odd, and overall bits of it feel underdeveloped (while others are crafted in great detail), but when the pen is laid down, you know this was motivated by strong feeling, and has noble motives. Mankell really means this, and is really impassioned when he is able to hit upon the AIDs topic. The scenes at the hospice are among the best in the book. You know - if you didn't already - this is a topic close to Mankell's heart, but that it is so close means that bits of the book feel forced out so he can plot a novel round the issue.

The book has it's strengths: Louise is fascinating, when removed from her sadness, and Mankell's crusading is powerful, as is his evocation of place and atmosphere. But the mystery elements are sketched scantily, and overall it doesn't come together too well as a thriller. It's a noble but flawed book (and the title, which reflects an obsession of Henrik's, is irritatingly irrelevant, and that obsession, annoyingly, only symbolic) though I would say it is worth reading for its strengths, and the fact that it's Mankell.

Gripping, exotic but melodramatic page turner
So, this is a novel about a Swedish archaeologist called Louise Cantor, and her quest to find out why her (adult) son has died. It's apparently suicide, but of course Louise doesn't believe it and sets off on a quest to find out the truth that takes her from Greece to Sweden to Spain to Australia to Mozambique and a few other places besides. Louise's plane-hopping doesn't do much for her state of mind (or her carbon footprint, let's be honest) but it makes for a gripping tale, and one that's a bit ambitious in its scope.
The globetrotting makes the novel seem quite exotic, especially the African sections. Mankell works with a theatre group in Mozambique, so I guess he's qualified to write about the place. He makes it seem dark and dangerous, full of mystery and suspense. But then he does that with the sleepy little town of Ystad in the Wallander novels.
I enjoyed reading this very much, and it's certainly a great page turner. The main character of Louise is pretty well drawn (better done than Linda Wallander in `Before the Frost') as a distraught mother on a mission, so perhaps Mankell is learning how to portray women. Having said that, I found the character of Lucinda, the woman she meets in Mozambique, quite hard to believe. I always have issues with Mankell's dialogue and this novel is no exception - there are some dreadful bits of dialogue. Maybe it's the translator.
The novel as a whole is rather melodramatic too, which could put some readers off. It reminded me of `King Solomon's Mines' sometimes, and `The Island' at other times. If you made a movie of this book, it would probably be quite corny, and I wasn't too sure I bought the stuff about human experiments on Aids sufferers.
Even so, it's a good read, full of atmosphere, with a good, if not entirely believable, story that will keep you turning the pages.

Not really worth the effort
This is the second Mankell I've read, the first being the equally morose Depths. I can't say I'm very impressed so far.

This book is quite hard going, it stutters and stops and is littered with implausible dialogue. Sometimes it reads like a 12 year olds school essay, for example when Oxfam is described as a really big voluntary organisation doing some superb work. Well, yes, that may be true, but it's not the sort of text that's going to make someone turn pages. Maybe it's the translation ?

The plot is equally odd. The sheer number of flights being taken by Laura is ludicrous, lots of promising situations turn out to be pointless - for example, the mugging story seems only to be a very clumsy way of highlighting that there are poor Africans. Am I supposed to feel sorry for someone who robs at knifepoint ? Also, money seems to be no object in this world, Laura and her ex-husband can fly around thw world, live in endless expensive hotels and hide away in obscure towns without the slightest thought for what it all costs. Am I supposed to feel ashamedly rich as a European compared to Africans ? If so, perhaps a bit of reality would have gone a long way, I don't know many people who can take months off work without notice and live the lifestyle Laura leads.

I'm trying to think of 1 main character in the book whose company you would enjoy, and I'm afraid there are none - they are all unlikeable and selfish, even the dead son. Perhaps that was the point ?

The only decent sections of this book were the scenes in the Aids centre, which were very well described and harrowing. But the rest ? Not the best I'm afraid.