His books outsell the Harry Potter series in Germany.

	"BEFORE THE FROST" By Henning Mankell New Press ($24.95)

A Web site from London, Mankellholics Anonymous, has been created for those hopelessly addicted to his Kurt Wallander crime novels. Who is the object of this international groundswell of popular appreciation (absent only in America)? Not Henning Mankell himself, who dislikes publicity and keeps a low profile, but Kurt Wallander, the divorced, gruff, overweight inspector and his band of gloomy, complaining brothers at the Ystad police station.

Not since Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's extraordinary Martin Beck series were best sellers in the late 1960s has a Swedish crime series gained such international attention.

Now, in the ninth book of this series, as Wallander apparently approaches retirement, Mankell's work has begun to catch on in the United States. Translations of the previous books in the series, which began in 1991, have come fairly quickly.

Mankell calls "Before the Frost" a "Linda Wallander mystery," because Kurt's mid-20s daughter, with a troubled past, splits the leading role in this book.

She's just graduated from the police academy and is waiting to join the force. Another young officer, Stefan Lindman, who was introduced in the previous novel, "The Return of the Dancing Master," has an important role here as well. It is, perhaps, a watershed moment for dedicated readers who may expect a changing of the gloomy guard.

Linda is new to the police business, so new that she can't be officially active until this novel ends. She gets involved because a childhood friend, Anna has disappeared.

The police are investigating the brutal, ritualistic murder of an old woman and incidents in which animals have been set on fire.

Kurt refuses to take the disappearance of Linda's friend seriously. So Linda, with time on her hands, starts snooping around and asking questions herself, against her father's advice.

This quickly leads her into illegal activities, injury, some serious conflicts with her father and some tantalizing hints that may link Anna to the murdered woman.

Mankell is a master of the traditional arts of the crime novel, narrative pacing and suspense. While there is plenty of mystery in the book as well as the realistic details of police work, perhaps the most interesting scenes involve the troubled relations of Linda with her long-divorced parents and her own introspective musings.

Kurt and Linda have to deal with a new relationship that is both professional and familial. Both are intelligent, stubborn and volatile, which makes for wonderful and surprising moments.

Linda's mother Mona, now remarried, has a crisis of her own and looks to Linda, who is not particularly sympathetic, for support. Walking into her mother's home unannounced, Linda sees Mona standing naked drinking cold vodka from the bottle.

Shocked and offended, Linda criticizes her mother, refuses to listen to her problems and leaves, only to feel guilty for her self-righteousness.

These family scenes and Linda's own self-scrutinizing thoughts are depicted with both subtlety and insight.

The other focus of the novel is religious extremism. The book begins with the thoughts of a man who escapes from the mass murders and suicides of the Jim Jones commune in Guyana. It ends on Sept. 11, 2001, just as Sweden learns of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In between, Mankell tries to imagine, as a novelist can, how people are brought, or bring themselves, to do barbaric deeds to strangers and even to their own families.

Despite several comic moments, this is not a joyful book. Linda and other young characters lighten the somber mood that is well suggested by the Swedish countryside just before the frost. But Mankell is hoping these small, local incidents may tell us something about the unhappy tensions that bedevil our world.

If the future of Mankell's series looks good, it's hard to be as optimistic about the bigger picture.