1/27/2024 0 Comments The faceless killersWallander's investigation is sidetracked as he interviews witnesses to find the killers. Wallander is trying to track down Lövgren's mistress and son when a Somali refugee is shot and killed. Meanwhile, Wallander learns that Lövgren secretly had a fortune stashed away and made large payments to his former mistress, the mother of his illegitimate child. However, the information is leaked to the press, and soon white supremacist groups are becoming violent. Maria Lövgren dies at the hospital, and her last word is "foreign," something Wallander tries to keep from the police. Wallander's wife has recently left him, and he's lost touch with his daughter since she tried to commit suicide four years ago. Detective Kurt Wallander is called in to investigate. Johannes has been gruesomely killed, and Maria has been strangled with a noose and is barely alive. Wallander ultimately brings the killers to justice through painstaking police work.Īs the novel begins, Maria and Johannes Lövgren are found at their rural farm. Meanwhile, he must cope with a leak to the media that the killers were foreign causing a string of anti-refugee violence, including another senseless murder. ![]() Wallander must deal with depression following his divorce, his daughter's emotional and physical distance, and his own problems with food and drinking. I’ll pick up the next one if I see it on a free shelf, like this one.Faceless Killers is the story of divorced police detective Kurt Wallander's quest to bring to justice the murderers of an elderly farming couple. 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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