Henning Mankell is a Swedish author whose books have been popularized in part by the Wallander series on PBS. I fully admit, I bought this book because I’ve watched all three episodes of Wallender (hey, Kenneth Branaugh is Kurt Wallander, how could it not be good?).
Faceless Killers is set in the early ‘80s in Ystad, Sweden. Kurt Wallander is a 42 year old police sergeant whose wife has just left him, his daughter’s estranged, his Dad is going senile, he has the hots for the new prosecutor, and he is faced with one of the most gruesome murders he has the misfortune to have to investigate. An elderly couple has been tortured and beaten in a remote farm and nobody knows why. The only clue Wallander’s team has to go on is the dying woman’s final word of “foreign”. When the press gets a hold of this tidbit, in an already strained society that lets refugees cross in at any time, this is fuel on the flames and suddenly local refugee camps are the target of hate crimes. Wallander must quickly figure out why these simple farmers would be subject to such a brutal end while balancing his own precarious life.
This was an okay read, a bit typical in the detective genre (ie washed-up alcoholic cop whose wife left him and now he has to solve horrible crime). What I like about this book was I could feel the cold of Sweden, I could sense the desolation in the landscape, and I could see how everyone could be depressed. The story moves along pretty briskly, then seemed to peeter out a bit at the end, as if the author couldn’t quite figure out how to tie everything up in a realistic manner. Still, I think Mankell pulled it off.
As I mentioned earlier, this was the first book in the series and I’m willing to try a couple more to let the characters and setting coalesce.
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