Faceless Killers - Supernormal Reads

Paperback, 280 pages

English language

Published January 2003 by Vintage Crime / Black Lizard.

ISBN:: 978-1-4000-3157-3
OCLC Number:: 50228573

(1 review)

It was a senselessly violent crime: on a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death, and his wife is left to die with a noose around her neck. And as if this didn’t present enough problems for the Ystad police Inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman’s last word is foreign, leaving the police the one tangible clue they have–and in the process, the match that could inflame Sweden’s already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments.

Unlike the situation with his ex-wife, his estranged daughter, or the beautiful but married young prosecuter who has piqued his interest, in this case, Wallander finds a problem he can handle. He quickly becomes obsessed with solving the crime before the already tense situation explodes, but soon comes to realize that it will require all his reserves of energy and dedication to solve. --back cover

37 editions

ralentina reviewed Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

Why would you write this book?

1 star

Content warning Major spoilers!

Until the last few chapters, I was enjoying this book just fine. I don’t frequently read murder mysteries, but there is no denying we all want to find out who did it. So, I let the story capture me and went along. The social background against which the facts take place in rural Sweden, with its nostalgia for a lost past, its growing inwards migration, and xenophobia, I thought they added just a little weight to the book, in a positive sense. Granted, the celebration of the police and the benevolent understanding of the resentment towards foreigners are not right up my alley, politically, but I was willing to let that go. I even appreciated that the protagonist is himself quite conservative in this respect. [spoiler alert] But towards the end, when it becomes clear that not only the murders are indeed undocumented migrants, but that there is no explanation for their sadistic cruelty, I felt cheated, from a reader’s point of view (why indulge in the murder’s brutality, if it isn’t a clue?), and annoyed, from a citizen / occasional migrant. Really? If a book is going to play with the xenophobia of the public, it needs to do better than this!