Author: Henning Mankell
Publisher: New Press, The (March 1, 1997)
Format: Paperback; Pgs 279
Genre: Suspense
Source: Paperbackswap.com
Series: Kurt Wallander #1
This book chilled me from the very beginning. I cannot say for sure if it was the storyline or the location, but the brutal killing of a couple in a remote farmhouse in Sweden, still makes me shutter.
At 5am on a January morning, Ystad police inspector Kurt Wallander is called out to investigate a murder. After a neighbor senses that something is wrong, he notices a window open on a neighboring farm. Going over to investigate he finds one man brutally beaten to death and a noose around a woman’s neck. As the farmer approaches the dying woman, she utters one word “foreign”.
Battling his own demons, a father with dementia, a family life in ruins and a town where anti-refugee feelings are running high, Wallander needs to solve this case before the whole situation blows up in his face. With little to go on and sheer determination, he sets out to solve this mystery.
Faceless Killers will have a very specific audience. The characters are not overly likeable, the harshness of the country is not enchanting, the storyline is very slow – and by the end, you do not really care about the “who” of the “whodunit. You will plod through and investigation with a depressed investigator who is determined to find a solution only because there is nothing else in his life.
Maybe there was something lost in the translation, but this book had very little to offer me. I picked it up, I put it down, took almost 3 weeks to read it. No spark, no humor and a conclusion that seemed to come at the right time to put us both out of our misery.
At 5am on a January morning, Ystad police inspector Kurt Wallander is called out to investigate a murder. After a neighbor senses that something is wrong, he notices a window open on a neighboring farm. Going over to investigate he finds one man brutally beaten to death and a noose around a woman’s neck. As the farmer approaches the dying woman, she utters one word “foreign”.
Battling his own demons, a father with dementia, a family life in ruins and a town where anti-refugee feelings are running high, Wallander needs to solve this case before the whole situation blows up in his face. With little to go on and sheer determination, he sets out to solve this mystery.
Faceless Killers will have a very specific audience. The characters are not overly likeable, the harshness of the country is not enchanting, the storyline is very slow – and by the end, you do not really care about the “who” of the “whodunit. You will plod through and investigation with a depressed investigator who is determined to find a solution only because there is nothing else in his life.
Maybe there was something lost in the translation, but this book had very little to offer me. I picked it up, I put it down, took almost 3 weeks to read it. No spark, no humor and a conclusion that seemed to come at the right time to put us both out of our misery.
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