#HENNING MANKELL FACELESS KILLERS SERIES#

But he provides essential information only at the last minute, which makes the solution feel more like an appendix than a conclusion. The brutal murder of a farmer and his wife threaten to inflame anti-immigrant sentiments in Sweden, and the Ystad. Mankell is clearly a skilled writer, and his portrait of Wallender (who periodically slides beneath respectability) is effective. However, a leak to the press complicates the investigation by arousing anti-immigrant feelings, some of which are expressed in anonymous threats. Wallender puts those clues on the back burner when he learns that Johannes, ostensibly a simple farmer, had a secret life involving wealth and connections unknown to his wife. Rydberg, a police force old-timer, says the noose's unusual knot and the word foreigner, which Maria uttered before she died, are important. Such consolations can't help him absorb the scene at the Lovgren farm, where elderly Johannes Lovgren has been brutally beaten and stabbed to death and where his wife, Maria, is found barely alive with a noose around her neck. Since his wife walked out on him, Kurt Wallender, a middle-aged cop in the small town of Lenarp, has drowned his sorrows in opera and far too much liquor. This item: Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell Paperback 16.93 The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell Paperback 14.49 The White Lioness by Henning Mankell Paperback 10.72 The Dogs of Riga Henning Mankell 746 Paperback 194 offers from 1.44 The White Lioness Henning Mankell 1,004 Paperback 172 offers from 1. If Mankell’s prose doesn’t quite have the searing crisp clarity of, say, Åsa Larsson or Mari Jungstedt, he still provides a robustly engrossing murder mystery.In his first appearance in English, Swedish bestselling author Mankell combines thriller-quality entertainment with a depiction of anti-foreigner prejudice in Sweden, painted here as a very chilly place indeed. The crime is well-conceived, the investigation carefully logical (and littered with a plausible number of initially-promising dead ends), the social commentary is nuanced and reasonably thoughtful.

#HENNING MANKELL FACELESS KILLERS SERIES#

In tone, temper, and pace (as well as in his author’s sociopolitical leanings), Wallander is very much the spiritual son of Martin Beck, persistent to a fault, though with less of Beck’s patience and with a rather more dour mood. Murray - translator Narrated by: Dick Hill Series Kurt Wallander, Book 1 Critic Reviews.

This constant accretion of humdrum detail slows the story, but it also gives it a pleasing three-dimensionality: we’re tricked into accepting Wallander as a real person, and by extension accepting also the colleagues and family members around him.

Sometimes, when he read a crime novel, he discovered with a sigh that things were just as bad in fiction. ‘He wondered why almost every policeman was divorced. And he breaks-or at least scuffs up-the fourth wall: This personal trauma intrudes repeatedly on the investigation, as does a kaleidoscope of often mundane happenstance: his car runs out of petrol, he misses appointments, he sustains a succession of minor injuries (and some not so minor), he repeatedly vows to make better meal choices the next day. In Faceless Killers, his wife Mona-for whom he retains strong feelings-has recently left him, his daughter Linda has become estranged, his father appears to be descending into irascible senility. He is cast, in other words, very much in the mould of the archetypal fictional detective. Wallander isn’t a particularly stable character: he drinks to excess, has quite severe mood swings, and follows his own irrational hunches while the evidence appears to be pointing in a quite different direction. It seems as though the only way to avert an escalation into outright racial violence is to solve an apparently-insoluble murder mystery … When a leak to the media suggests (incorrectly) that Wallander’s team believes foreigners to be responsible for Johannes Lövgren’s death, community suspicion falls on the residents of a nearby refugee camp, and the mood turns ugly.

Emerging briefly from unconsciousness, Maria Lövgren is able to give the police just one word, ‘foreign’, as a clue to the identity of her assailants there’s precious little material evidence, and no apparent motive for the brutal home invasion. It opens with the discovery of a vicious attack on the Lövgrens, an elderly farming couple, which has left the husband dead and the wife fighting for her life. In the farming town of Lenarp, there has been a brutal assault against an elderly couple. Henning Mankell was a Swedish writer and dramatist (he died in 2015) whose most well-known legacy is the sequence of crime novels, much in the Sjöwall & Wahlöö ‘Martin Beck’ mode, which feature the detective Kurt Wallander (whom, from TV, we now know to look very much like Kenneth Branagh).įaceless Killers ( Mördare unte ansikte, 1991, translated by Steven T Murray) is Wallander’s debut. Faceless Killers is the first book in the series and it is very good.

Henning mankell faceless killers