Much of Faceless Killers is concerned with the controversies surrounding refugees, asylum-seekers, and open borders in Sweden. In what way is Faceless Killers, and perhaps every mystery novel, about the need to assign meaning to a world that can appear random, chaotic, and meaningless? How does solving a crime restore, if only briefly, order to the world?Ĩ. A sneering face that laughed scornfully at every attempt he made to manage his life”. Confronted by a case he cannot solve, Wallander is plunged into an existential crisis: “Somewhere in the dark a vast meaninglessness was beckoning. To what extent is this kind of intuition responsible for solving crimes in Faceless Killers? Where else does a hunch or sudden insight play a role in leading the detectives in the right direction? How does it help him solve the murder of the Somali refugee?ħ. Wallander knew it without knowing how he knew”. Within moments of meeting Ellen Magnusson, Wallander suddenly realizes that she is “the mystery woman with whom Johannes Lövgren had had a child. What is it about being a cop that would make marriage unsustainable? How does Wallander feel about his estranged wife? What do their interactions reveal about why the marriage failed?Ħ. Sometimes, when he read a crime novel, he discovered with a sigh things were just as bad in fiction. Wallander wonders why “almost every policeman was divorced. What aspects of his life is he neglecting? Why does Henning Mankell devote so much of the novel to Wallander’s personal life: his strained relationships with his father, his daughter, and his soon to be ex-wife? What does this personal dimension add to the novel?ĥ. “I’m searching for the slayers of the dead,” he says, “and can’t even pay attention to the living”. Before a press conference, Wallander has an attack of self-doubt. In what ways do the setting, an isolated area of rural Sweden, and the story’s first victims, an elderly couple, make the murders seem especially horrifying?Ĥ. What does this comment suggest about the relationship between representations of violence for purposes of entertainment and real violence? What does it suggest about the differences between Sweden and America?ģ. Rydberg describes the crime scene as being so grisly it was “like an American movie”. In what ways is Faceless Killers surprising? What is unusual about its crimes and the manner in which they are solved? Why would Henning Mankell choose to make the novel about two apparently disconnected crimes, one motivated by greed and another by racial hatred? How do you think the refugees are portrayed? And why?Ģ. With a keen eye for the nitty-gritty of real police work, a sure sense of the psychological dimensions of his characters, and a clear grasp of the political and racial turmoil in contemporary Sweden, Henning Mankell delivers a tour de force in Faceless Killers. Digging for facts and following his hunches, he brings himself not only closer to solutions but also closer to danger.
One theory and one suspect after another turn out to be dead ends, but Wallander is tenacious. Now, with the press breathing down his neck and the Swedish government applying pressure to protect the refugees from an increasingly hostile public, Wallander has two crimes to solve. “Do you really want to look like a pitiful old man?” The investigation itself is quickly stalled, and just when it seems things can’t get worse, racial tension flares as a refugee camp is set on fire, and, just days later, a Somali refugee is murdered.
“You flabby piece of shit,” he says to himself. Wallander is eating badly and hardly sleeping, putting on weight and suffering from his own anxieties about aging. His wife has left him, his daughter won’t speak to him, and his father is drifting into a resentful, disoriented old age. But when he finds an elderly couple brutally tortured, the husband dead and the wife barely clinging to life, and no apparent motive for the murder, he knows he has the case of his life. and summoned to the scene of a crime outside the village of Lunnarp, he thinks the whole thing might be little more than a senile farmer’s overactive imagination. When Kurt Wallander is suddenly wakened from an erotic dream at 5:13 a.m. The introduction, discussion questions, author biography, and suggested reading list that follow are designed to enhance your group’s reading of Swedish novelist Henning Mankell’s brilliant mystery, Faceless Killers. “An exquisite novel of mesmerizing depth and suspense.” - Los Angeles Times
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