![]() Readers who think of Sweden as snow-white are in for a surprise.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. But how long will it take his plunge into ethnic hatred to give him the answers he needs? Though "the last thing Kurt Wallander felt like was a laughing policeman," fans of Maj Sjîwall and Per Wahlîî will feel right at home in this first (1991) of Mankell's five Wallander novels, right down to the laconic paragraphing. Surprised by the news that Johannes Lîvgren was not exactly the colorless chap he appeared, Wallander despairs of finding enough time or energy to kindle a romance with deputy D.A. Or else we'll take over") from somebody who's willing to set fire to a refugee camp barracks and gun down a visiting Somali to show how serious he is. #Faceless killers kindle seriesI’ll pick up the next one if I see it on a free shelf, like this one.Who would so savagely kill an elderly farming couple in the Swedish town of Lenarp-the husband gruesomely tortured, the wife slowly strangled with a noose tied in an unusual knot-and then step out to the couple's barn to feed their horse? Inspector Kurt Wallander, battling midlife crisis-his estranged daughter has rarely called him since she lit out from home his estranged wife greets him by telling him how much weight he's put on-would love to have the leisure to speculate about the identity of the killers, described only by the dying Maria Lîvgren as "foreign." As acting chief of the Ystad police, though, he's got more urgent business on his hands: a series of xenophobic phone calls ("You now have three days to make up for shielding foreign criminals. In all, this was a fast read, good not great, but I hear the Wallander mysteries get better as they go on. There’s much more satisfying detecting in the B case. The A case only comes together due to nearly-blind chance near the end of the book, almost a deus ex machina. I don’t think it’s politics, though- I think the B case was better structured. Maybe it’s just politics but I was more interested in the B case: an immigrant ambushed and killed in revenge for the A case, a brutal murder of an old farm couple where signs point to foreign killers. That seems accurate and as someone who likes overstuffed fictional universes I relate to the impulse, but if I was supposed to think of them as anything other than Scandinavian names, I failed that test. There’s a good half-dozen cops involved in the investigation but they’re pretty much all indistinguishable except for Rydberg (who’s old) and Wallander (who’s the protagonist). In keeping with the overall tone, this book is deeply procedural except in a few flashes of action. Only cruel death and the threat of sectional (immigrant vs native) violence seems to wake anyone up from their daily rounds of unsatisfying, unpunished vices (gambling, philandering) and jobs. The only thing that distinguishes Wallander is that he likes opera- that’s his only character trait that distinguishes him from the “lonely divorced murder police” archetype (and come to think of it, I don’t think he’s the only one of those with a yen for classical music). Everyone is bored and boring and kind of sad. Life in Sweden as depicted in this book (and, to my understanding, the burgeoning Scandinavian crime fiction scene) as social democratic purgatory, but without the dynamic element purgatory usually has. Maybe that’s just an indication of how well Mankell gets into the mindspace of his cop protagonist, Kurt Wallander, in this first of several Wallander mysteries.īut there’s an extent to which everyone is faceless, here. I understand Mankell was a leftie - was on the Gaza flotilla that got shot up by the IDF, for instance - but this book seems pretty critical of Sweden’s lax border policies. Ciphers, flotsam from the fall of the Iron Curtain washed up on Sweden’s all-too-welcoming shores. Henning Mankell, “Faceless Killers” (1991) (translated from the Swedish by Steven Murray) – Well, SPOILER ALERT, the killers are indeed faceless. Review – Schulman, “Let the Record Show”.Review – Smallwood, “The Life of the Mind”. ![]()
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