The first of the famous Wallender novels.

Given Wallender's and Mankell's great reputation I was expecting a little more from this. Overall, even though I don't read much crime, I found "Faceless Killers" perfectly okay - everything seemed largely plausible. It was a little odd how quickly Mankell sped through events towards the end though.

Nothing amazing but this was good enough to not put me off reading more of Wallender's adventures. ( )

Mankell was recommended to me by a friend because I was raving about Steig Larsson's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." Mankell was supposed to be just as good and I was excited to find another source of a good, literary series.

Not so much. The mystery part was okay, but the main character seemed such a stumblebum and a misanthrope that it is hard to be enthusiastic about moving on to the next book. He bumped his head about a half-dozen times, fell off a scaffold, spilled a whiskey on the suit he had just had cleaned (to eliminate a stain from a spill).

Unlike my favorite police character, Lucas Davenport from the series of books by john Sanford, Mankell's protagonist, Kurt Wallander, never seems in control of events. He has a few insights, and he is persistent, but things seem to sort of happen around him.

Not a favorite. ( )

An elderly couple are brutally murdered in their farmhouse near a provincial Swedish town. It's detective Kurt Wallender's job to solve this crime, but shocking as the murders are, they are secondary (maybe tertiary) to this novel. The woman's dying word "foreigner" stirs up the local community against refugees who are pouring into nearby camps. Violence against the refugees and ultimately another murder make Sweden's refugee policy (circa 1990) central to this novel as well as providing more crimes for Wallender to solve.

This novel is also a psychological portrait of Wallender. He's aging, conservative, his wife has left him, he eats poorly, he drinks too much and he's somewhat lecherous. The only thing he's good at is being a detective and even there he fails to heed the advice of one of his colleagues in the police department. In short he's every cliche of a police detective, and yet he comes across as a full-fleshed, complex, and sympathetic character.

I'm not sure if it's Mankell or his translator but the writing is very spare and artless. It is evocative of the cold, open landscape of rural Sweden. This book is interesting in that through my American eyes I've always seen Sweden is very progressive so the controversy and racism regarding refugees was something I was completely unaware of.

I learned of this book from The Hieroglyphic Streets which contains links to other reviews. ( )

Smooth noir detective fiction exploring anti-immigrant feelings in Sweden, this is the first of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels from the series that would later inspire the BBC series Wallander. The opera-loving detective is an appealing underdog, bad at just about every part of his life except his job: he's gloomy, drinks too much, weighs too much, has troubled family relationships, dreads the Swedish winter, and frets over his country falling apart. Ultimately, though, his courage and unwavering insistence on justice make him worthy of our care and attention. Though the novel's moments of high drama are limited, Faceless Killers is a likeable, realistic, understated police procedural. ( )

My dad is a big Henning Mankell fan and after I finished reading Steig Larsson, he recommended that I move onto Mankell with his Wallander character. I had heard a lot of good things about Mankell but until now, Swedish crime fiction didn't sound that desirable. Thank Steig Larsson for changing my mind on that one!

Wallander is called to a remote farmhouse after the bodies of a husband and wife are found brutally murdered. The wife survives for only a short while but she manages to gasp out the word "foreign" before dying. This makes Wallander and his colleagues believe that one of the local asylum seekers might be behind it (the book is set in 1990 so no EU then) and when the public find out, there is a violent backlash against the refugee processing centres in the area.

Wallander has to find out who murdered the farmer and his wife, while at the same time, hold his own collapsing personal life together. His wife has left him and his mentally unstable daughter never comes to visit.

The book is a little dated (as I said, it is set in 1990 so no computers, no internet, Wallander uses a car phone(!)) but it is still a nice little crime story to get your teeth into. I will definately be checking out the other Wallander novels to see if they can improve on this one. ( )