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jess_gb 's review for:
Faceless Killers
by Henning Mankell
Given the hulabaloo that I had been hearing surrounding the appearance on the American reading scene of Swedish dynamo mystery writers, I must say that my first foray into the world of translated Scandinavian fiction was a little bit disappointing. I felt like Kurt Wallander was a character that I had seen before: a sullen detective with family issues who lives a relatively boring life, drinks too much and is generally a mess. Perhaps my issue was that I was expecting a riveting who-done-it, which this story definitely was not. In a story as bleak as the Swedish winter in which it is set, Wallander investigates a heinous crime in a bumpy plodding manner that is certainly too realistically tedious for American fiction, which prefers its crime capers with plenty of bells and whistles. On the whole, it kept me interested, although not riveted, and would be better suited for those looking for a realistic character piece about Sweden in the age of globalization that happens to use a detective as its vehicle rather than those looking for a solid detective story.