Skip to main content
By
Faceless Killers / Henning Mankell
Click here to check availability at AFPLS

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Here we are / Graham Swift

By
This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.
Post a Comment
Read more

So Much for That / Lionel Shriver

By
This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin , a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable. The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his un doing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorde...
1 comment
Read more

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

By
If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...
2 comments
Read more