Kennedy's Brain by Henning Mankell (2007)

I've liked some of Mankell's other work, so when I saw this in a street-side little library by a friend's house, I borrowed it. For some reason it took a long time to get through this one. This was a differently paced mystery, where Louise Cantor, an archaeologist digging in Greece returns home to Sweden for a conference and visits her son Henrik, only to find him dead. It is ruled a suicide, but she feels it was not and is determined to find out what happened to her son. She follows his footsteps, finding an apartment of his in Spain, briefly connecting with his father in Australia, following the path to Mozambique, where there is an AIDS facility that Henrik had visited. The reference to Kennedy's brain was very oblique - stories about the brain going missing had fascinated Henrik, representing high level secrets. I think my favorite part of the book was the look into life in Africa. I actually marked the passage: "She (Louise) was travelling to a continent that was for her as blank and unexplained as it had been for the Europeans who ventured there hundreds of years previously." I feel it is so with me too.