This is as true of victims as of villains. But the evil she meets is too vast, too ungraspable through the conventions of the thriller, for its representatives, despite their vividness, ever to transcend the dark 'silhouettes' of Henrik's original perception.

Binding added, 'It presents Louise's wide-ranging, perilous investigation with button-holing intensity, unmatched even by this master of suspense. In this double predicament lie the strengths and the weaknesses of the novel'. Theirs is a wickedness hard rationally to comprehend, yet so linked to power and the bastions of the establishment that it is also hard to fight, let alone defeat. Reviewing Kennedy's Brain in The Independent, Paul Binding found that Henrik Cantor, 'an idealistic young Swede' whose death, and its subsequent investigation by his mother Louise provides the narrative drive of the book, 'has acknowledged that there exist those who, deliberately and using all their intelligence and money, seek to profit from the distress of others. Her journey takes her to Australia, to Spain and to Mozambique. Louise embarks on a search for answers to explain why the tragedy has occurred. The protagonist is Louise Cantor, a Swedish archaeologist who on returning home from an excavation in Greece makes a tragic discovery. With some elements similar to those of John le Carré's The Constant Gardner, Mankell's novel addresses the African HIV/ AIDS epidemic, the pharmaceutical industry, and greed centered on the African epidemic.

The English translation by Laurie Thompson was published in September, 2007. Kennedy's Brain is a novel by Swedish writer Henning Mankell, that was originally published in the Swedish language in 2005.

Het graf by Henning Mankell