![]() ![]() Wallander makes more attempts to make amends with his wife, who refuses. When he tries to make a high-speed getaway, the perpetrator crashes his car and dies. Wallander tracks down the ex-cop and discovers the murderer. He learns that a Citroën was used to commit the crime, and links it to a stolen car reported by an ex-cop. Wallander begins to interview witnesses who were at the scene of the Somali man’s shooting. News breaks that an innocent Somali refugee is fatally shot by a white supremacist. Wallander searches for Lövgren’s mistress and illegitimate son. While steering clear of the media storm, Wallander discovers that Johannes Lövgren secretly held a huge fortune, which he drew from to make payouts to his former lover, with whom he had a child. A number of white supremacist groups take the national stage and demand stricter immigration policies in Sweden. Maria dies in her hospital bed, after uttering the word “foreign.” An unknown listener leaks her last word to the media, which quickly leads to unfounded allegations that the killers were immigrants. ![]() Johannes is found slaughtered, and Maria is found with a tight rope around her neck, in critical condition. He is called on to solve the case of the murders of Maria and Johannes Lövgren, a couple found at their farm after placing a desperate call to police. While extremely depressed and alcoholic, Wallander hopes to rekindle his relationship with his daughter, who has grown progressively distant ever since she attempted suicide several years before. The novel begins in the wake of Wallander’s divorce. Wallander finds that the brutal murders may have been perpetrated by foreigners the case, as it unravels, makes an implicit commentary on the relationships between Sweden’s immigration policies, the epidemic of racism, and Swedish nationalism. While Wallander’s personal life flounders after a recent divorce, he strives to find the killers of a well-respected elderly couple who owned a local farm. It is the first book in the Wallander series, named after its recurring protagonist, a middle-aged detective based in Ystad, Sweden named Kurt Wallander. I’ll pick up the next one if I see it on a free shelf, like this one.Faceless Killers is a 1991 crime novel by Swedish author Henning Mankell. In all, this was a fast read, good not great, but I hear the Wallander mysteries get better as they go on. There’s much more satisfying detecting in the B case. The A case only comes together due to nearly-blind chance near the end of the book, almost a deus ex machina. I don’t think it’s politics, though- I think the B case was better structured. Maybe it’s just politics but I was more interested in the B case: an immigrant ambushed and killed in revenge for the A case, a brutal murder of an old farm couple where signs point to foreign killers. That seems accurate and as someone who likes overstuffed fictional universes I relate to the impulse, but if I was supposed to think of them as anything other than Scandinavian names, I failed that test. There’s a good half-dozen cops involved in the investigation but they’re pretty much all indistinguishable except for Rydberg (who’s old) and Wallander (who’s the protagonist). In keeping with the overall tone, this book is deeply procedural except in a few flashes of action. Only cruel death and the threat of sectional (immigrant vs native) violence seems to wake anyone up from their daily rounds of unsatisfying, unpunished vices (gambling, philandering) and jobs. The only thing that distinguishes Wallander is that he likes opera- that’s his only character trait that distinguishes him from the “lonely divorced murder police” archetype (and come to think of it, I don’t think he’s the only one of those with a yen for classical music). Everyone is bored and boring and kind of sad. Life in Sweden as depicted in this book (and, to my understanding, the burgeoning Scandinavian crime fiction scene) as social democratic purgatory, but without the dynamic element purgatory usually has. Maybe that’s just an indication of how well Mankell gets into the mindspace of his cop protagonist, Kurt Wallander, in this first of several Wallander mysteries.īut there’s an extent to which everyone is faceless, here. I understand Mankell was a leftie - was on the Gaza flotilla that got shot up by the IDF, for instance - but this book seems pretty critical of Sweden’s lax border policies. Ciphers, flotsam from the fall of the Iron Curtain washed up on Sweden’s all-too-welcoming shores. Henning Mankell, “Faceless Killers” (1991) (translated from the Swedish by Steven Murray) – Well, SPOILER ALERT, the killers are indeed faceless. Name Asterisk on Review- Ma, “Harassment A… Review – Fountain, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”. ![]()
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