Faceless Killers

Hardcover, 346 pages

English language

Published Nov. 21, 2003 by ISIS Large Print.

ISBN:
978-0-7531-6977-3
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OCLC Number:
156300547

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3 stars (4 reviews)

One frozen January morning at Sam, Inspector Wallander responds to what he expects 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 whose personal life is in a shambles. But now Wallander must forget his troubles and throw himself into a battle against time and against mounting xenophobia. --back cover

39 editions

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.