Book Review: Faceless Killers

Faceless Killers is the first novel in the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell, who is billed as Sweden's greatest living* mystery writer.  The truth is that, other than the fact that both Mankell and Larsson's books are set during the winter... and when is it not winter in Sweden?... there is not much similar about them.

Image from Amazon.  See?  Winter.

Faceless Killers is what I believe you would call a police procedural.  It follows Detective Kurt Wallander around as he tries to solve the murder of an elderly couple in rural Sweden and navigate his disastrous personal life.  The novel is not particularly scary or gory or really a mystery in the sense that you, the reader, are somehow going to guess what happens in the end.  As an aside, even though it's a cliche, I actually think I like "locked room" mysteries the best out of all the different crime/detective/mystery fiction I read.  It's fun to try to evaluate what each of the characters is saying and doing and try to figure out what the conclusion will be.

This was a very quick read, and I'd like to see how the stories/characters evolve from this one, which was written in 1991.  I'm planning to add a bunch more from this series to my library hold list; however, I have to work through my backlog of magazines before I get into any more novels.

Another aside: This issue of Psychology Today had an interesting article about X-linked inheritance, with a good explanation of how it works and how it might be related to inheritance of intelligence, if you like that kind of thing.

Read any good books lately?

*Since that guy who wrote The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo died... isn't that convenient????.  Hmmmm... maybe we should ask Inspector Poirot to investigate.