Rating
The Pequod Review:
On the surface, Henning Mankell’s mystery novels appear to be about plot (usually a gruesome murder with few immediate leads) but they are really about characters and setting. Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander (the protagonist in most of Mankell’s books) is a flawed but brilliant detective. He has a drinking problem, mild depression, and a wrecked personal life, but he makes up for it with an obsessive focus on his job. Wallander works in the mid-sized Swedish city of Ystad, a desolate and lonely town that never seems to thaw. Within this setting, Mankell creates satisfactory detective procedurals, but it is the character of Wallander coupled with Mankell’s laconic prose that make these novels so compelling. In Faceless Killers, the first Wallander book, an elderly farming couple in a small Swedish town are killed, and the wife’s last words describe the killers as “foreigners.”