An immigrant camp is firebombed, racist threats are made, an Somali is shot in revenge.

The murders are blamed on foreigners, that being the last words of one of the victims corroborated by a strangely knotted noose. The characters would at times become mouthpieces for political questions. Perhaps Mankell was trying to accurately capture the sometimes tortuously slow pace of police work whilst simultaneously maintaining the pace of a novel but, speaking personally, it grated. As the novel progressed, swathes of action were summarised in a matter of paragraphs months passed within fractions of a sentence an infatuation became an affair and seemed to fizzle out within two lines. Perhaps it was the fact that this was in translation but I found that the prose was too clipped and too laconic.

And certainly the opening chapter of Faceless Killers looked set to fulfil those hopes.Īn atmospheric farmyard, the dead of night, an increasing sense of unease that things were not right at the neighbours a prose style that, whilst somewhat terse, had an understated quality to it a murder with just enough hints of incredible violence without the lurid details and embellishments that a writer like Jo Nesbo may have felt tempted to dwell on. Perhaps it was the fact that it had been adapted for TV, wherein he was played by Kenneth Branagh perhaps it was because I’d read some good reviews. I’m not sure why but I had high hopes for Kurt Wallander.

02 faceless killers