2. Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

On a cold winter night outside of Ystad, Sweden, a horrific crime is committed against an elderly couple. When police get to the scene, Johannes Lovgren has been beaten and stabbed, and his wife, Maria, has a noose tied with an unusual knot around her neck. Later at the hospital, she murmurs the word “foreign” before she dies, which leads police to think the crime was linked to foreign murderers. Racist hate messages grow in the area, and suddenly a Somali at a refugee camp is shot. Are the crimes connected?

Kurt Wallander is the detective who is in charge of solving the crimes in Henning Mankell’s first Wallander mystery series. Wallander is a striking character, who wrestles with his own personal demons including a failed marriage, a distant daughter who has tried to commit suicide, and a father struggling with the beginning stages of dementia. He struggles not only with trying to solve the murders of the Lovgrens, but with the news that Johannes Lovgren was not the simple farmer that everyone thought he was. Hidden wealth and long buried family secrets could have tempted someone to kill Johannes.

Throughout this skilled thriller, the beautiful and sparse setting of a Swedish winter is always present, drawing readers into a different world. Mankell’s writing about isolation and sadness is extremely effective in describing Wallander’s background, and Mankell also brings attention to refugee and hate crime problems in modern Sweden.

I am a huge fan of Swedish and Norwegian novels, but for some strange reason had never read Mankell. It wasn’t until I saw the Wallander television series that I got hooked and wanted to read them. I definitely plan to finish the books and for those interested in the television version, the Library owns the DVDs. If you enjoy Swedish mysteries, other authors to try are Ake Edwardson, Hakan Nesser, Asa Larsson, and Mari Jungstedt.