Kurt Wallander · Book 1

Faceless Killers

by Henning Mankell

Published
1 January 1991
Pages
306
ISBN-13
9781860468223
Type
novel

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Cover of Faceless Killers

About this book

Faceless Killers opens the Kurt Wallander series in 1991, introducing the overweight, diabetic, divorced detective Henning Mankell built as the genre's anti-hero. It's followed by The Dogs of Riga, and its investigation into a brutal farmhouse murder sets the template for the melancholy, socially engaged procedural that founded Scandinavian noir.

Its place in Kurt Wallander

Faceless Killers is book 1 in the Kurt Wallander series. It is followed by The Dogs of Riga. See the full Kurt Wallander reading order.

Kurt Wallander is a middle-aged detective in the small Swedish town of Ystad, and Henning Mankell built him, deliberately, as the anti-hero of the genre he helped invent: overweight, diabetic, divorced, depressive, and quietly appalled by the racism and social fracture he sees creeping into a Sweden he no longer fully recognises. Mankell used each investigation -- into organised crime, far-right violence, trafficking, political conspiracy -- as a lens on late-20th-century Swedish anxiety about immigration, the…

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