Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

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.

Average Customer Rating:

ENJOYABLE BUT...	Customer Rating:
The first Mankell/Wallander book I've read. I enjoyed it, but would I want to read any more? Wallander is a caricature - drink problem, overweight, failed marriage - so it is only the gloomy Swedish setting that distinguishes it. Fun whilst it lasted, but I am not about to go out and buy the set.

Meet Inspector Wallander

Customer Rating:

If not the best police procedural in terms of plot, this is certainly a good introduction to Inspector Kurt Wallander. He's a newly single grumpy forty-something who frets about his family; but he is a good, conscientious policeman who's not afraid of doing the hard stuff himself. When a gruesome double murder is committed on a farm out in the country, it takes graft in the dull Swedish winter to track down the faceless killers of the title. We don't find out much more about his family or colleagues in this first volume, but I look forward to reading many more.

The review I read.......

Customer Rating:

.....must have been writeen by Mankell's best friend or agent. On the strength of it I bought the book and how shallow, slow, drab, grey and conclusivly dull and predictable it was too. I hate detective fiction where the people who did it enter the book ten pages from the end. Set in the Swedish winter in places that sound about as appealing as frostbite, Wallender, Manning's ace detective,is a real uninspiring bore (who wants to know that he diorea everyday and looks down at his underpants and realises they need changing?) and his team aren't much better. They is no character you don't care if they carry on living or not. I gave it two starts instead of one, as I presume, given Mankell's output of Wallender 'mysteries' he must have improved or maybe the buying population of the villages and town he mentions is enough to maintain a living by.

Surprise package

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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

"For murder, though it have no tongue

Customer Rating:

will speak with most miraculous organ." Hamlet. An aging farmer and his wife have been brutally attacked on their isolated farm in southern Sweden. They appear to have little money and no enemies. The only clue, if you can call it that is the dying word of the farmer's wife: "foreign". The police have have little else to go on but go on they must. That is the plot for Henning Mankell's first Kurt Wallander detective mystery: "Faceless Killers". The result is a well-done police procedural. My `discovery' (I know he has already been discovered by millions of readers) of the Kurt Wallander series was the natural result of my reading a series of "Martin Beck" detective mysteries by the husband and wife team of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall. Wallander, like Beck, is a police detective in Sweden. Unlike Beck, whose beat was Stockholm, Wallander works in the small southern-Swedish city of Ystad. The Wallander series takes place in the 1990s while the Beck series took place in the 1960s and 1970s. Since this book is the first in a series, it provides the reader with a great deal of background information on the main characters. Wallander is gritty and determined. He is also newly separated from his wife and estranged from his daughter. Further, his father is showing the first signs of senility. Wallander sometimes drinks too much and is clumsy in his dealings with the interim prosecutor, an attractive young woman sent down from Stockholm. The book moves along at a relatively quick pace. Mankell does a good job of keeping the pot boiling without revealing too much too quickly. The detectives follow false leads and their fallibility adds a nice veneer of realism to the story. The importance of the farmer's wife's last word "foreign" is clear but its meaning is not fully revealed (or proven) until the book's climax. I enjoyed "Faceless Killers". Although there was nothing uniquely creative or groundbreaking about the plot or its resolution, Mankell tells a good story. He also manages to evoke a compelling picture of life (and police work) in an area as far from Stockholm as you are likely to get. As such these books make a nice contrast with the Martin Beck series. (Mankell does make a quick reference to one of the Beck books, "The Laughing Policeman", so it seems clear that the obvious comparisons between the two books and series are also clear to Mankell. "Faceless Killers" is worth reading. While I don't think it was the best book in the series (the natural result of having to spend a lot of time with the requisite development of a large number of characters that populate a series), I think it is worth reading. I've read two other Wallander books ("The Dogs of Riga" and "Side-Tracked") to date and have enjoyed both of them. If you like police procedurals and like the idea of a somewhat exotic (if cold) setting, I think you will like "Faceless Killers". L. Fleisig.