Faceless Killers - Supernormal Reads

Paperback, 298 pages

English language

Published 2009 by Vintage Books.

ISBN:: 978-0-09-953527-0
OCLC Number:: 939881227

(1 review)

One frozen January morning at 5am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he believes is a routine call-out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, both victims of a violence beyond reason. The woman supplies Wallander with his only clue: the perpetrators may have been foreign. When this is leaked to the press, it unleashes racial hatred.

Kurt Wallander is a senior police officer. His life is a shambles. His wife has left him, his daughter refuses to speak to him, and even his aging father barely tolerates him. He works tirelessly, eats badly, and drinks his night away in a lonely, neglected flat. But now, with winter tightening and his activities being monitored by a tough-minded district attorney, Wallander must forget his troubles and throw himself into a …

One frozen January morning at 5am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he believes is a routine call-out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, both victims of a violence beyond reason. The woman supplies Wallander with his only clue: the perpetrators may have been foreign. When this is leaked to the press, it unleashes racial hatred.

Kurt Wallander is a senior police officer. His life is a shambles. His wife has left him, his daughter refuses to speak to him, and even his aging father barely tolerates him. He works tirelessly, eats badly, and drinks his night away in a lonely, neglected flat. But now, with winter tightening and his activities being monitored by a tough-minded district attorney, Wallander must forget his troubles and throw himself into a battle against time and against mounting xenophobia. (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!