James Thane's Reviews > Faceless Killers

This is the first entry in Henning Mankell's series featuring Swedish detective Kurt Wallander. When we first meet him, Wallander has a boatload of personal problems: he is recently divorced; he's estranged from his daughter; he's drinking too much; he has a lousy diet, and his father is showing signs of senility.

Against the backdrop of this troubled personal life, Wallandar is assigned to lead the investigation of the savage murder or an elderly farm couple. There is no apparent motive and there are virtually no clues, save for the last dying word of the murdered woman, which is "Foreign."

At the time of the killings, some Swedes are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the large numbers of asylum-seekers and other immigrants who are making their way into the country. Fear and prejudice are on the rise, and although the police have absolutely no evidence to support such a conclusion, some anti-immigrant elements jump to the conclusion that foreigners were responsible for the killings. They want revenge and they seek to use the murders as an excuse to reverse the immigrant tide.

Mankell thus sets the stage for a clever police procedural set against the larger social issue of how welcoming Sweden--or any other country--should be to growing numbers of immigrants. Wallander is typical of the breed of plodding Scandinavian detectives who refuse to give up until they have deduced the solution to the case. At times, though, you find yourself wondering why he soldiers along in the face of the overwhelming personal problems in his life off-duty.

Mankell is a very good writer and I admire what he has done here. That said, I find the Kurt Wallander character to be a little too oppressed and a little too humorless for my taste. Like a lot of Scandinavian mysteries, this one takes place in the dead of a long, depressing winter, which only reinforces the generally depressing mood of the book as a whole. I enjoyed reading it, and I'm certainly willing to give the series another try, but I may need a jolt of someone like Lucas Davenport to cheer me up a bit first.