Faceless Killers (Kurt Wallender Mystery)

Paperback, 288 pages

English language

Published July 2, 2000 by Harvill Pr.

ISBN:
978-1-86046-808-7
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OCLC Number:
185680786

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3 stars (4 reviews)

The first case of Inspector Kurt Wallander. He drinks too much, he works too hard, and he sleeps too little. His life is a shambles. But all of a sudden these are the least of his worries.

Wallander is a senior police officer at Ystad, a small town in the wind- lashed Swedish province of Skåne. His wife has left him, his daughter won't speak to him, his ageing father barely tolerates him. Then, at 5 a.m. on a frozen January morning, he responds to a routine call. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death in his isolated farmhouse; his wife is lying barely alive beside him. Wallander has one clue: the killers may have been foreign. When this information is leaked, xenophobia is unleashed in Skåne, and Wallander finds himself in a race against time: solve the crimes or the death toll will rise. --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.

Subjects

  • Crime & mystery