Violence and Bigotry!

This is the first book I’ve read by Henning Mankell. An old farmer is murdered in his home. His wife is a survivor.

The city of Ystad is in an uproar, believing that immigrants are the cause.

Kurt Wallander struggles with the paranoia of bigotry, as well as the stress of having to search for a killer. Paperback Sjajan švedski autor, najpre ga je objavljivala Narodna knjiga a sada Čarobna knjiga... Da ne govorimo o Kenetu Brani koji je presonalizovao britansku verziju serijala o inspektoru Valanderu... :) Za ljubitelje dobrih krimića... I da malo upoznate i Švedsku... :) Mystery Thrillers, Literature Fiction An elderly couple is robbed and brutally murdered and it's up to police inspector Kurt Wallander to find the killer or killers. Can Kurt act on the meager information he has available and solve the case as his private life disintegrates around him?

On the heels of reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, I decided to branch out and try a couple more Swedish crime authors. Faceless Killers is the first such book to fall into my hands.

Faceless Killers isn't a happy book, much as its title indicates. It's bleaker than a visit to an insurance office, mostly due to poor Kurt Wallander and his life.

The mystery is an intriguing one and delves into the secret life of one of the victims. The mystery is not of the solveable variety but that's ultimately not that important. My main attractions to Faceless Killers were the glimpse into Swedish society and Kurt Wallander himself.

The fact that one of Wallander's clues is that the killer is a foreigner thrusts the reader into a world of refugees, racism, and red tape. There are false leads and I have to admit I wasn't sure what was going on in the investigation part of the time.

And that brings us to Kurt Wallander himself. He's no super-hero unless lonliness and not having anything go right in his personal life is a super power. He's getting older and fatter, his wife left him, his daughter is a stranger, his relationship with his father is strained, and all he has is his job. Instead of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, what I was primarily reminded of when I read this was John Lutz's Alo Nudger series starring a similarly sad character.

Faceless Killers is a good police procedural story. It's pretty bleak and moves a little slowly for my tastes but is still a good read. I'll give it a 3, possibly upgrading to a 4 somewhere down the line.

Ugh.

Maybe this book is dreadfully translated...or maybe it's like Ikea furniture. Mostly you end up with a bunch of bits that don't make sense. It's a popular theory in Australia that Ikea furniture is some sort of revenge upon people who live in sunlight. Maybe Henning Mankell is a plot to get the people who escaped the Ikea trap.

We all over here prefer more Abba and less bad furniture and miserable books please. German Henning Mankell might be the most famous Scandinavian writer of crime novels in the US. May I humbly ask why? I can think of at least three Swedes and two Danes who are far, far superior. And let's not forget the Norwegians. Read Frederik Skagen for Christ's sake. I'm not sure he's been translated but he's brillant when it comes to the twisted mind of killers and rapists.

Actually, I don't like being hard on writer colleagues, but this book is simply not very good. The prose is flat, only two of the characters come alive for me, and I was a tiny bit bored as well. I made the mistake of teaching this novel at Portland State University and my students absolutely hated it. Every single of them. I didn't though. I like the portrait of the main character and the small meditations on immigrants and racism in Sweden. Henning Mankell

Kurt Wallander stieß die Tür mit dem Fuß auf. Es war schlimmer, als er es sich vorgestellt hatte. Viel schlimmer. Später würde er sagen, daß es das Schlimmste war, was er je gesehen hatte. Und dabei hatte er weiß Gott schon eine Menge gesehen. Ein altes Bauernpaar ist auf seinem Hof ermordet worden. Nicht nur das Motiv der Tat liegt völlig im Dunkeln, vor allem deren furchtbare Brutalität irritiert die ermittelnden Polizisten um Kurt Wallander. Und dann hatte die alte Bäuerin, kurz bevor sie im Krankenhaus starb, den Beamten noch einen letzten, seltsamen Hinweis gegeben ... (Klappentext) Mörder ohne Gesicht (Kurt Wallander #1)

During 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. (Yes, it had English actors playing Swedes and was filmed 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. And now I'm really hooked.

Written in 1990, this book introduced Wallander as a police detective in a backwater town in Sweden. 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. A wave of anti-immigrant violence and hysteria is on the verge of being unleashed.

Wallander is having enough trouble dealing with his messy personal life. 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. The strain of balancing his increasingly unmanageable personal life and his police work are starting to take a serious toll on him. In addition, he's constantly worried about the new wave of crime and violence he's noticed rising in Sweden.

Wallander is a great sort of every-man detective. Not brilliant in a Sherlock Holmes or Columbo kind of way, and definately not built for leaping into action against the bad guys, Wallander just comes in and attacks the tasks he thinks he needs to complete to solve the crime and get his life under control. Even though he doesn't manage to get through the list most days and experiences numerous setbacks, he just starts over again the next morning even if doesn't really feel like trying. Despite his frustrations with his own shortcomings and the government bureaucracy, Wallander manages to make progress with his steady two-steps-forward/ one-step-back method.

Good writing with an intriguing crime and a very relateable main character made this an interesting read. I'll be checking out more of the Wallander books. German Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

All detectives have to have their personality quirks and personal problems to keep the story interesting. But Swedish detective Kurt Wallander has so many things going on that it would take a full hour with Dr. Phil to even make a dent.

His wife left him three months ago and she is filing for divorce. He may be falling in love with a beautiful young prosecutor, but she is married. 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. The detective’s elderly father lives alone in a farmhouse and is getting dementia, walking through the fields with suitcases in the night.



He’s also drinking too much. And gaining weight because without his wife cooking, he eats only junk food.

The main crime to be solved is the brutal torture and murder of an elderly farm couple who lived in an isolated house. The only initial clue is that the female victim said the word ‘foreigner’ just before she died. 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. 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.



The style of the Wallander series is that of a police procedural. This book is the first in the series of eleven. I thought it was a very good mystery and better than the other one I read and reviewed, The Man Who Smiled. 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.

Ystad from offbeattravel.com
The author (1948-2015) from irishtimes.com
Dark, brooding and earthy â€" like a good Swedish crime mystery should be.

Writer Henning Mankell first published Faceless Killers in 1991 and an English edition, translated by Steven T. Murray, was published in 1997. Besides being a good book, this is notable as Mankell’s introduction of his famous detective Kurt Wallander.

Set in the small city of Ystad, in the southern most tip of Sweden, and farther removed from larger cities like Malmo or Stockholm, Mankell has given this mystery a sort of small town charm, distinguished from the tense and energetic crime novels in urban settings. No ulcer ridden, overworked police chief barking orders here, or lengthy descriptions of cityscapes; the author has created an ominous, heady atmosphere of fear and simmering outrage after a murder of an elderly couple in a bucolic farming village.

In Wallander, Mankell has crafted a complicated and darkly charismatic protagonist. With his drinking, poor eating habits, surly manner and clumsy way with close relationships he is almost an anti-hero.

Well told and with a close eye for detail, Faceless Killers also deals with such issues as racism, national identity, immigration policy and individual rights. Known for his social activism, Mankell uses the crime novel as a vehicle to reveal and discuss inequalities and societal problems.

Good book.

A good story but the detective wandered a lot and when the mystery was solved it barely took ten minutes to identify the killers and to catch them.
Una maravilla de novela. Me encantó de principio a fin. Cansa un poco el tema del policía borracho de vida desastrosa, pero es una constante de difícil solución.
Mucha tensión narrativa. Mucha emoción.
Un Wallander genial, a pesar de todo.

A marvel of a novel. I loved it from start to finish.
A lot of narrative tension. A lot of excitement.
A great Wallander, despite everything. Henning Mankell