Faceless Killers is the first book of 14 crime novels in the Wallender series by Swedish author Henning Mankell, written between 1991 and 2014. Wallander is a police inspector in the town of Ystad, located southeast of Malmo. The books were written in Swedish and translated into English.
There have been several TV series and movies made of the Wallander books. As a character, Kurt Wallander is a bit of a train wreck. He pays little attention to his health, he has rocky relations with his family and friends, and he gets very involved in his cases to the point of stress and emotional instability. What drives Wallander is solve crimes and in each novel he is dogged determined to follow every lead, but it may leave casualties along the way.
In Faceless Killers, an elderly farming couple is brutally slaughtered. The trail to the killers is a long one and in the meantime there is another murder of a refugee when members of the far right blame immigrants for the crime.
The Wallander books are police procedural stories, but interlaced with all the personal challenges for the investigators, and for the police in a time of political and social change. Each novel stands alone on its own merit. I have read several and have watched most of the TV series and movies. Faceless Killers is not his best novel. His first has flaws and does not hold together as well as his later books.
But, the Wallender book series is a collection of fine crime fiction in the Nordic noir style.
Recommended, but there are better Wallender books to read first. 4.1 out of 5.0 stars
