![]() His marriage has just failed, his emotionally troubled teenage daughter flits in and out of his life, and his estranged father is showing signs of dementia. Wallander is having enough trouble dealing with his messy personal life. A wave of anti-immigrant violence and hysteria is on the verge of being unleashed. When an elderly couple are brutally assualted and murdered in their rural home in an apparently motiveless crime, the initial clues make some citizens think that someone in the flood of immigrants seeking asylum following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe is responsible. Written in 1990, this book introduced Wallander as a police detective in a backwater town in Sweden. Just go with it.) I liked it quite a bit and since I also loved the The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I decided to read some more about these murderous Swedes. (Yes, it had English actors playing Swedes and was filmed in Sweden. The author (1948-2015) from ĭuring one of my periodic efforts to prove to myself that I'm not one of The Great Unwashed, I watched PBS's Masterpiece Mystery series featuring the Swedish detective Kurt Wallander as played by Kenneth Branagh. There’s a bit of local color of Sweden and I liked the map that allows you to follow the action around the southern section of the country, especially around Ystad, a real city where the detective is based. I thought it was a very good mystery and better than the other one I read and reviewed, The Man Who Smiled. This book is the first in the series of eleven. The style of the Wallander series is that of a police procedural. Wallander and his team have to investigate these additional crimes as these Nazis murder one man, injure others, and set fire to a local immigrant refugee camp. This gets leaked to the press and starts a frenzy of anti-immigrant feelings among the neo-Nazi types of Sweden who want immigration to cease and foreigners to be deported. The only initial clue is that the female victim said the word ‘foreigner’ just before she died. The main crime to be solved is the brutal torture and murder of an elderly farm couple who lived in an isolated house. And gaining weight because without his wife cooking, he eats only junk food. ![]() The detective’s elderly father lives alone in a farmhouse and is getting dementia, walking through the fields with suitcases in the night. ![]() He is estranged from his wayward daughter who travels around the world not telling her parents where she is and appearing unexpectedly for brief times. He may be falling in love with a beautiful young prosecutor, but she is married. His wife left him three months ago and she is filing for divorce. But Swedish detective Kurt Wallander has so many things going on that it would take a full hour with Dr. Tenacious and levelheaded in his sleuthing, he and his colleagues must contend with a wave of violent xenophobia as they search for the killers.įaceless Killers is a razor-sharp, stylishly dark combination of police procedural and searing social commentary that reaches beyond its genre to produce “a superior novel-and a harbinger of great things to come” ( Booklist).All detectives have to have their personality quirks and personal problems to keep the story interesting. His family is falling apart, he’s gaining weight, he drinks too much and sleeps too little. In charge of the investigation is Inspector Kurt Wallander, a local detective whose personal life is in a shambles. The only clue is the single word she utters before she dies: “foreign.” Taut and atmospheric, this winner of Sweden’s Best Mystery Award is a gripping mystery in the classic detective tradition, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “an exquisite novel of mesmerizing depth and suspense.”Įarly one morning, a small-town farmer discovers that his neighbors have been victims of a brutal attack during the night: An old man has been bludgeoned to death, and his tortured wife lies dying before the farmer’s eyes. Faceless Killers marks the “brilliant US debut” ( Library Journal) of Henning Mankell’s highly successful Kurt Wallander detective series.
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