Product Description

One frozen January morning at 5 am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he believes is a routine call out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, both victims of a violence beyond reason. The woman supplies Wallander with his only clue: the perpetrators may have been foreign. When this is leaked to the press, it unleashes racial hatred. Kurt Wallander is a senior police officer. His life is a shambles. His wife has left him, his daughter barely refuses to speak to him, and even his ageing father barely tolerates him. He works tirelessly, eats badly, and drinks his nights away in a lonely, neglected flat. But now, with winter tightening and his activities being monitored by a tough-minded district attorney, Wallander must forget his troubles and throw himself into a battle against time and against mounting xenophobia.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #729 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review

A new world had emerged, and he hadn't even noticed it. As a policeman, he still lived in another, older world. How was he going to learn to live with the new? . . We live as if we were in mourning for a lost paradise, he thought...

It could be said that as a policeman, Kurt Wallander, Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell's award winning creation, isn't much cop. He eschews the meticulous and the scientific in favour of his hunches, which all too often lead up blind alleys. He drinks too much, then drives. He doesn't get enough sleep. And to cap it all, his wife has left him and his daughter doesn't speak to him.

Faceless Killers is the first of the acclaimed Wallander novels. Set in January 1990, in a frozen landscape and against the backdrop of a rapidly changing Europe, this is a bleak novel that deals with the thorny issues of immigration and racial hatred. Wallander investigates a brutal double murder at a remote farmhouse in which the only possible clues are the whispered words of a dying woman and a freshly fed horse. When this limited evidence and its implications leak to the press it stirs right wing activists into action.

At times Wallander seems too much like the traditional hard-drinking, hard-living, hard-boiled detective of old, but he is more than that. He is a truth seeker, trying to make sense of his rapidly changing world, his method happens to be detective work, and it is this search that lies at the philosophical heart of the novel.

About the Author
Henning Mankell is the prize-winning and internationally acclaimed author of the Inspector Wallander Mysteries, now dominating bestseller lists throughout Europe. He devotes much of his free time to working with Aids charities in Africa, where he is also director of the Teatro Avenida in Maputo.

Customer Reviews

Familiar Story, Unfamiliar landscapes
Faceless Killer is the first of the Kurt Wallander Novels by the Swedish crimewriter Henning Mankell. The book deals with the double murder of an elderly farmer and his wife in a brutal manner which apparently lacks motive. Subsequent investigation leads the hapless detective, Kurt Wallander, on a trail which brings him face to face with the issues surrounding european refugees, immigration and racism.

A suprisingly engaging read considering that the subject matter does not break new ground. The charcter of Wallander is all to familiar from the many other renderings of dishevelled and emotionally disfunctional detectives that we have become familiar with. The beauty of this book lies in its unique setting. Anybody with a passion or familiarity with Scandinavia and Sweden in particular will feel utterly satisfied with Mankell's rendering of the changing moods of the area.

Overall this is a nicely rendered story with a sadly all to familiar lead character and story line but set in a well described and unique setting for it's genre.

Surprise package
I was bought this book as a Christmas present. I had never heard of the author or the detective who is the main character.

However what an absolute delight. A real story about a detective in a small police force in Sweden. Normally he has to deal with petty crime so when a very violent double murder is uncovered our detective "Kurt Wallander" has a problem on his hands.

What is exceptionally good about this book is the development of the main character Wallander. His wife has left him, his father is on the start of suffering from dimentia and his daughter wont talk to him. This is story of a policeman working laboriously through what small clues there are, managing his private life, yet it is done with a very ydry humour through out the book.

Loved it

A Wallender fan
I have read most of the Kurt Wallender books and I just love them. I hadn't read the reviews and was surprised to find that people seem to find the plots simple. I suppose we all look for different things in our crime books! For me it is the feelings that Wallender goes through in his cases. It is always as if he is drowning in his investigations and blindly trying to reach any sort of grounding to build on. He just seems much more believable than some superhuman detective who forsees everything and will need even more twists and turns from his also superhuman criminal mastermind for the story not to crumble.
I recomend this book, as well as sidetracked, the fifth woman and one step behind especially for those new to Wallander's books!