Faceless Killers - The Library of the Uncommons

Paperback, 298 pages

English language

Published Nov. 20, 2011 by Vintage Books.

ISBN:: 978-0-09-957182-7
OCLC Number:: 1146221315

(4 reviews)

One frozen January morning, Inspector Kurt 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 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 a tide of racism. Wallander's life is a shambles: his wife has left him, his daughter refuses to speak to him, and even his ageing father barely tolerates him. He works tirelessly, eats badly, and drinks his nights away.

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 racial hatred. --back cover

39 editions

colin reviewed Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell (An Inspector Wallander Mystery)

Didn't love it!

2 stars

This is the first book of a series, so maybe they get better, but it wasn't great. The writing is very lazy. There's single sentences that cover things I wanted to know more about, and entire paragraphs where a word or two would've sufficed. There's a lot of casual racism and sexism throughout, which the reader is supposed to understand as problematic, but Wallander often seems to thinks to himself "Huh, that person is racist and/or sexist, but I'd rather not call them out right now." Perhaps the most interesting thing about the book is Wallander's own problems with women and minorities, which as a character he seems to recognize and want to address, but the structure around it isn't good enough to make that meaningful or interesting.