Faceless Killers

I started reading Henning Mankell just recently. I started with some of the later books in the series but wanted to start from book 1. This story was a slow build but got better. The ending happened very fast.

This is not a classic novel, nor will Mankell win a Nobel prize for the effort but this is his best novel as a balanced and well written piece of literature. It is probably not quite as entertaining as One Step Behind, a later novel. It is short and well balanced with interesting characters. It is the first novel in the Wallander Swedish police detective series. I thank fellow reviewer Leonard Fleisig for bringing this author to my attention. The writing is simply superb. So far, I have bought and read six novels in the Wallander series. I thought that the novel was excellent. It has a less complicated plot than some of the subsequent novels and there is more emphasis on the characters. Some of the later novels in the Wallander series rely on a string of bloody and gruesome murders to keep the story going. They go on and on - right to the end - and that becomes a bit too much. For that reason I think that the present novel is his best. The Wallader novels remind me a bit of the Peter Robinson Inspector Banks series, but Mankell's style is a little more spirited and more interesting and does not mimic Peter Robinson's style. The book opens with a map of southern Sweden showing the location of the town of Ystad. The latter is the primary setting, although the crimes are spread around the southern part of Sweden. The police station is located in Ystad which is near the most southerly part of Sweden, south and east of Malmo and on the Baltic. Malmo itself is on the west coast of Sweden, just 10 km across the narrow straights from Copenhagen. Part of the tale takes place in Malmo. I will not give away the plot and the essential plot elements are outlined by the publisher: there is a murder of a farmer and an attack on his wife. They live on a remote farm near Ystad. Kurt Wallender and Ryberg along with the other policemen in the Ystad police unit try to solve the crime. This is a great and a fast read that I was able to read with a great deal of enjoyment in less than a day or two. I read it while staying at a hotel in southern Sweden, not too far from the crime scene, and that the details and descriptions of the places, people, and other details are made to seem authentic. This is a book that I highly recommend. The writing is smooth and flawless. This is a good story with a realistic plot and a good balance between human interactions and the crime itself. He tries to tie the plot to current social problems in Sweden, and it works effectively.

Inspector Kurt Wallender is a good cop in a small city in the far south of Sweden. As a man, though, he has a wide assortment of problems and failings, from having been left by his wife and being semi-estranged from his daughter, to eating too much and drinking way too much, to feeling left behind as Swedish society changes for the worse. He feels guilty about not visiting his increasing senile father often enough and not staying in touch with his sister. He gets annoyed at the media and at his boss, and the impending cancer death of his closest colleague has him thoroughly depressed. But as an investigator, he's nothing if not dogged. In this first novel in the series, an elderly farm couple are brutally murdered in what turns out to be a robbery, which somehow gets blamed on "foreigners." Sweden's policy on accepting refugees in search of asylum is extremely loose and very badly administered -- the immigration people and the police are constantly at loggerheads and blaming each other as things drift further out of control. This brings out some of the right-wing, ultra-nationalist, xenophobic crazies -- the Swedish version of Klansmen, as Wallender thinks of them -- and an innocent Somali man in a refugee camp is shotgunned to death. Now there are two crimes to solve, and maybe more to come if the immigrant-haters can't be stopped. Mankell, though, is about as far from Agatha Christie as it's possible to be. The reader will spend a lot of time looking over the shoulders of Wallender and his colleagues as they compile evidence, pore over the possible interpretations in their daily meetings, occasionally go around in circles trying to make things fit, and still try to lead their own individual lives outside the station house. Christie would slyly insert a clue early in the story, which Miss Marple would wave in your face at the end, but that isn't how real cases are solved and that isn't how this author deals with reality. Luck plays a big part, truth and lies sound equally believable, the wrong suspects are accused until their innocence is demonstrated. The cops become frustrated with the lack of good leads, go on to other cases, and go back to the murders when new evidence turns up. Just like real life.

Now this was a find. Recently, I was reading book reviews in either _Booklist_ or _Library Journal_ and came across a rave for the latest Mankell translation, _One Step Behind_. When my next opportunity to order a few books came around, I put several Mankell titles on the list and _Faceless Killers_ is the first in his Kurt Wallander series. Mankell is a Swedish author and his books are translations and have been hailed as the first series to truly live up to the standards set by authors Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo and their Martin Beck mysteries. I can't comment on that, never having read a Martin Beck, but I sure enjoyed this book. As the story opens, an elderly farmer discovers that his neighbors, also elderly, have been attacked. The husband has been gruesomely tortured and killed and his wife left for dead. Before she dies in the hospital, her last word is "foreign." With anti-immigrant sentiment running high already, the last thing the police need is for this to slip out to the media, but someone in the department leaks the information and suddenly refugee camps in the area are being firebombed. When a Somali refugee is killed, seemingly at random, Wallander and his men have two difficult cases to untangle. This was a very strong mystery, with a great central character and careful attention to settings. Wallander is cut from the same cloth as John Rebus and Alan Banks. He's struggling with loneliness after his wife has unexpectedly left him and his close ties with his daughter have been severed. He has to deal with an aging, possibly senile, father and his attraction to the new female district attorney who is filling in on an interim basis, and who happens to be married. Plus, he's drinking too much and putting on weight due to a steady diet of pizza and fast food. Wallander is a compelling character who spends much of his time brooding about the state of the world and the state of his society and, interestingly, he seems to have some sympathy for the anti-immigrant mentality. He's concerned that just about anyone can come to the country and request asylum, even crooks and shady characters. And, the way the system is painted in the book, with officials unsure of where to locate specific refugees, etc., we can see how the task of the police is made much more difficult than it need be. But tracking down the murderer of the Somali refugee is his job and he does it, even when a former policeman seems to have some connection to the crime. A very interesting mystery and one that held my attention throughout. Even though the murders which open the book seem to be impossible to solve, Wallander will not let them go. He sticks to the investigation, which drags on for quite a long time, and finally sees it through. I will definitely be reading more books in this series. Highly recommended.