Book Review: Faceless Killers
With all the recent brouhaha surrounding the Fifty Shades mommy-porn trilogy written by E. L. James, I gave it a cursory read, and I must say it's easily one of the worst ever decisions I've made. With a thread-bare plot about a young billionaire fulfilling his sadomasochistic desires by hiring a young virgin woman to be his sex-slave, the writing left me in hysterics and I cannot but help imagine how this piece of drivel could even become the fastest selling fiction!
So you can imagine my relief when I took up Henning Mankell's Swedish crime thriller Faceless Killers. As the title goes, the killers and their motives for the gruesome murder of an elderly couple on a farm in Lunnarp (that's the story in short for you) are cleverly not revealed till the climax, at which point it takes an interesting look at the escalating violence in the society we live in.
Inspector Kurt Wallander, who is in charge of the case, at one point early in the novel rues why "policemen in real life" were just as bad as in fiction when it comes to their personal lives. For Wallander's is in shambles - his wife has divorced him, his daughter barely acknowledges his presence and he shares a strained relationship with his ageing father. All he has is his job. And he works tirelessly to keep the city clean of murders stepping aside his individual troubles.
Fictionalizing a police procedural usually means clues and leads about the murders are swiftly obtained and the case is wrapped up within weeks. But Mankell lets the investigation run for almost eight months as Wallander and his team race against time to find the faceless killers. Partly because the protagonist is shown to be making mistakes (I made lots of mistakes, says Wallander in the last but one page) by pursuing false leads (that involve racism and the nation's immigrant crisis) and ultimately bringing the case to a cul-de-sac. With Faceless Killers, Henning Mankell explores a very different type of crime and he succeeds quite well.
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| Faceless Killers |
Inspector Kurt Wallander, who is in charge of the case, at one point early in the novel rues why "policemen in real life" were just as bad as in fiction when it comes to their personal lives. For Wallander's is in shambles - his wife has divorced him, his daughter barely acknowledges his presence and he shares a strained relationship with his ageing father. All he has is his job. And he works tirelessly to keep the city clean of murders stepping aside his individual troubles.
Fictionalizing a police procedural usually means clues and leads about the murders are swiftly obtained and the case is wrapped up within weeks. But Mankell lets the investigation run for almost eight months as Wallander and his team race against time to find the faceless killers. Partly because the protagonist is shown to be making mistakes (I made lots of mistakes, says Wallander in the last but one page) by pursuing false leads (that involve racism and the nation's immigrant crisis) and ultimately bringing the case to a cul-de-sac. With Faceless Killers, Henning Mankell explores a very different type of crime and he succeeds quite well.
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