Faceless killers

Paperback, 280 pages

English language

Published April 2, 2002 by Harvill Crime in Vintage.

ISBN:
978-0-09-945384-0
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3 stars (4 reviews)

Wallander is a senior officer 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 5am 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 begins 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.