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Faceless Killers / Henning Mankell
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If you, like me, were not sated with Scandinavian thrillers after the last Stieg Larsson Millennium installment, travel back to Sweden’s underworld in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, of which Faceless Killers is the first. The book opens with a horrifying scene of brutality that shatters the quiet solitude of a Swedish country idyll, and the intrigue grows as the case escalates with attacks against foreigners and an additional murder.

The small southern Swedish town of Ystad in Skåne is the setting for this series and Kurt Wallander is as believable a police inspector as you’ll ever come across with many human faults and no superpowers whatsoever. His dogged tenacity and his intuition are his greatest assets and allow him to solve the crime in the end.

Faceless Killers may not be as fast-paced as The Girl Who Played with Fire, but it still takes place in the same Scandinavian milieu where the winters are cold but the coffee is always hot and flows copiously, seeming to aid in the sleuthing process. Reminiscent of such Europe-based detective writers as Georges Simenon, Donna Leon, and Michael Dibdin, and Sjöwall-Wahlöö, of course! ©Ken Vesey, 5 May 2010

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