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.
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.
