Nothing was more sacred than ingrained routine" ( p. Should it be granted to them?'" ) however, there wasn't enough ink spilled in service of this purpose for my taste: more common are sweeping generalizations such as, "Sweden had turned into a country where people seemed to be afraid of being bothered more than anything else. Mankell's larger purpose is to examine the changes in Swedish society that occurred in the wake of the collapse of the Cold War and of several European Communist regimes (it wasn't only Sweden's immediate neighbors that precipitated these changes: as Wallender notes during an ill-starred night with Anette, "'People who belonged to the fascist secret police in Romania are starting to show up here in Sweden.
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Since the tight omniscient narrator remains focused on the schlubby Wallender (save only for the first chapter, where the focus is given to the male half of the neighboring couple to the murder victims), there is far less development of Wallender's subordinates and peers than one could wish Mankell here places far less of a premium on the seemingly incidental banter that McBain deploys so well to flesh out the cops in his 87th Precinct books. Though tensions are gradually heightened during the unfolding of the plot, I never viscerally felt the dread and trepidation that a more gifted writer can evoke in the course of such a story. While there was a certain amount of reassuring entertainment to be had from Faceless Killers, akin to what can be gleaned from watching a competently executed episode of the Law & Order franchise (or perhaps the Canadian shows DaVinci's Inquest or Cold Squad), it fares poorly when compared to virtually any book in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series.
#Faceless killers henning mankell series
Wallender is also adrift due to his wife's leaving him three months prior to the start of the novel (which is set in 1990), and due to his surly teenaged daughter Linda's avoidance of him in the interim, he finds himself drawn to an attractive, married prosecutor named Anette Brolin, newly arrived from Stockholm.įaceless Killers qualifies as comfort food, nothing more: the tepid, nearly vapid nature of its prose was heightened for me by the fact that the book that I read before it was an installment in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series ( The Surgeon's Mate), and the book that I read after it was the first book in David Peace's Red Riding Quartet, the blistering Nineteen Seventy-Four. Wallender is tasked to solve the grisly torture-murders of an elderly farming couple as the wife's last word before dying is "foreign," Wallender is under a certain amount of pressure to solve the case quickly, before the reactionary, anti-immigrant groups take revenge on the thousands of refugees who are drawn to Sweden due to the country's perhaps overly generous asylum policy.
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on PBS as part of WGBH's Masterpiece Mystery! series, in which the titular character is portrayed by Kenneth Branagh.
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includes a 19-paged excerpt from The Troubled Man, 2011), the first of the Kurt Wallender mysteries/police procedurals.įaceless Killers is the first of Henning Mankell's police procedurals featuring Kurt Wallender, here the acting chief of police in Ystad, on the southern Swedish coast and in the county of Skåne English speakers are probably most familiar with Wallender from the British television series Wallender, broadcast in the U.S.
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Murray NY: Vintage Crime / Black Lizard, 2011 ISBN: 978-5-8 369 pps. Uvula_fr_b4From Sunday, 5 February through Wednesday, 8 February, I read Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers (English translation by Steven T.