![]() He receives even worse medical news when his best friend is diagnosed with terminal cancer. ![]() Wallander has his father hospitalized and hires a private nurse to support him. Slowly, they reconnect, while Wallander’s father begins to struggle with dementia. Wallander discovers that his daughter is dating a medical student from Kenya, and intends to attend college. At the same time, he falls for a married public prosecutor who recently moved from Stockholm, and the two begin an affair. Wallander makes more attempts to make amends with his wife, who refuses. When he tries to make a high-speed getaway, the perpetrator crashes his car and dies. Wallander tracks down the ex-cop and discovers the murderer. He learns that a Citroën was used to commit the crime, and links it to a stolen car reported by an ex-cop. Wallander begins to interview witnesses who were at the scene of the Somali man’s shooting. News breaks that an innocent Somali refugee is fatally shot by a white supremacist. Wallander searches for Lövgren’s mistress and illegitimate son. While steering clear of the media storm, Wallander discovers that Johannes Lövgren secretly held a huge fortune, which he drew from to make payouts to his former lover, with whom he had a child. ![]() A number of white supremacist groups take the national stage and demand stricter immigration policies in Sweden. Maria dies in her hospital bed, after uttering the word “foreign.” An unknown listener leaks her last word to the media, which quickly leads to unfounded allegations that the killers were immigrants. Johannes is found slaughtered, and Maria is found with a tight rope around her neck, in critical condition. He is called on to solve the case of the murders of Maria and Johannes Lövgren, a couple found at their farm after placing a desperate call to police. While extremely depressed and alcoholic, Wallander hopes to rekindle his relationship with his daughter, who has grown progressively distant ever since she attempted suicide several years before. The novel begins in the wake of Wallander’s divorce. Wallander finds that the brutal murders may have been perpetrated by foreigners the case, as it unravels, makes an implicit commentary on the relationships between Sweden’s immigration policies, the epidemic of racism, and Swedish nationalism. While Wallander’s personal life flounders after a recent divorce, he strives to find the killers of a well-respected elderly couple who owned a local farm. It is the first book in the Wallander series, named after its recurring protagonist, a middle-aged detective based in Ystad, Sweden named Kurt Wallander. (Mar.Faceless Killers is a 1991 crime novel by Swedish author Henning Mankell. Also, American readers may find odd Mankell's bundling of his upright anti-racism message with broad notions of what constitutes acceptable social control. But he provides essential information only at the last minute, which makes the solution feel more like an appendix than a conclusion. Mankell is clearly a skilled writer, and his portrait of Wallender (who periodically slides beneath respectability) is effective. However, a leak to the press complicates the investigation by arousing anti-immigrant feelings, some of which are expressed in anonymous threats. Wallender puts those clues on the back burner when he learns that Johannes, ostensibly a simple farmer, had a secret life involving wealth and connections unknown to his wife. Rydberg, a police force old-timer, says the noose's unusual knot and the word foreigner, which Maria uttered before she died, are important. Such consolations can't help him absorb the scene at the Lovgren farm, where elderly Johannes Lovgren has been brutally beaten and stabbed to death and where his wife, Maria, is found barely alive with a noose around her neck. Since his wife walked out on him, Kurt Wallender, a middle-aged cop in the small town of Lenarp, has drowned his sorrows in opera and far too much liquor. In his first appearance in English, Swedish bestselling author Mankell combines thriller-quality entertainment with a depiction of anti-foreigner prejudice in Sweden, painted here as a very chilly place indeed.
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