Faceless Killers

Henning Mankell wrote exquisite noir mysteries! I love his books. With words he can immerse us into Sweden’s winter gloom, make us shiver and actually become as
depressed as the weather. Most of the Wallander series are set in gloom. Most of the time our detective is fighting his Demons. In Reading the story, words allow us direct admittance to his thoughts, words allow us to see how he deducts the important from the chaos. We understand how his thinking leads to developing a working hypothesis, a strategy.
Wallander ‘s great detection of the crime and deduction of what happened is there for us in the book. In a movie you follow the action. In a book you hear the thoughts behind the action. In this story a heinous crime is committed. How he gets from the scene of the crime to the solution is a series of twists, dead ends, and surprise. Wallander’s private life is forever butting in But, our detective is extraordinary. He puts away the unnecessary. He focuses completely.

There are two basic reasons why this book deserves five stars and is indeed a masterpiece.

One, Kurt Wallander, the main character, an ordinary, middle-aged policeman in a small town in southern Sweden, soon becomes someone you feel you know. He is someone who goes through the same (often depressing) experiences so many of us go through in our lives, as a marriage grows stale, as a child turns into a rebellious teenager, as a parent slowly sinks into old age.

Two, this is a book with deep roots in Swedish society, and by extension, in the society of any advanced country that calls itself (like Sweden) a democracy, that believes it has humanitarian traditions. And it’s a book that does not shy from raising deep, uncomfortable questions. In fact, Mankell (the author) has lived in Africa and brought his own views to his books and the character Kurt Wallander. As he explained on his website,
Racism for me is a crime, and therefore it seemed natural that I wrote a crime novel. It was after that the idea of a policeman was born.
The book is peppered with Mankell’s personal opinions about racism and how refugees are viewed and ill-treated in refugee camps in Sweden.

And that’s what makes the book important, highly relevant to our times – a must read, particularly now with the on-going migrant crisis in Europe.

I have been looking for a new series to get wrapped up in and I think I have found it. Wallander is a rather complex guy juggling work with various family ties and some internal issues. He is the sort of character that you can relate too. His character is honest and genuine. Not a cardboard cut out like many cops in books.

This book begins with a horrific murder that Wallander must solve, but along the way, things happen that take priority, but he sees them through and returns back to doggedly work through the original case.

Great start to a series and I am hoping the other books are as good as this one

Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers brings to life Kurt Wallander, a detective in a small town in the south of Sweden who, on a frozen January morning, comes face to face with the grisly murder of an elderly farm couple.
Beset with his own life in near-shambles, Wallander begins the painstaking process of finding the killers with little more to go on than coincidence and one word, “foreign.”
Mankell weaves a tale filled with examining Sweden’s immigration crisis, elder care, opera, failed marriages, father-daughter estrangements, media antics, all weaved into a tightly written page-turner of a police procedural. Mankell’s style is simple and head-on. It’s no wonder his Wallander books enjoy such acclaim. I’m hooked. Can’t wait to get started on the next one.

I’ve watched the Wallander series on PBS and wanted to try the books. This is the first I read and I was immediately drawn into Wallander’s world. Plan to continue to read his mysteries. I find them well worth my time. The character of Wallander is interesting, believable and definitely flawed, which only makes him more appealing. Other characters are also interesting. Occasionally I found the story confusing but that may have been because everything takes place in Sweden and the Swedish place names can be difficult. But I thoroughly enjoyed my first experience with Wallander.