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One winter night a retired farmer and his wife are savagely murdered in their farmhouse near the small city of Skane, Sweden. None of the neighbors have witnessed anything out of the ordinary, and few places on earth are as placid and conventional as rural Sweden, where anyone with skin darker than day-old snow is either a foreigner or back on holiday from Spain. The task of solving the crime falls upon Inspector Kurt Wallender, a decent man overwhelmed by the recent breakup of his family. The only clue left by the killers is a noose with a knot unfamiliar to Swedish forensics, and so presumably tied by foreigners. Xenophobia animates both the plot and theme of FACELESS KILLERS. When word leaks through the press that foreigners may have been responsible for the murder, a Somali asylum seeker is killed by racists in revenge, and Wallender has two cases to solve, with the threat of more killings to come. Wallender's sense of order is affronted on two sides; he's not convinced that Sweden should be so welcoming to refugees, and certain that any murder rips at the fabric of a heterogeneous Swedish society. Wallender is no Rebus, running rough over the fine points of the law. He is above all a conventional cop, and a staunch defender of the public order. Though he manages to survive several violent escapades, he unwinds one night by drinking excessively, then tries to drive home; from then until the end of the novel he disparages himself as a drunk driver unfit to be on the force. The power of the commonplace, and of ordinary decency, are familiar to those who've read the works of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, those previous masters of the Swedish crime novel, and Mankell follows the same well-marked path, down to the stripped, unadorned prose and domesticity of style. Those who have enjoyed the Wahloo-Sjowall books will find no great innovations in FACELESS KILLERS, but will find many of the same joys.
Reviewed by Robert Eversz, June 2002
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