
Mankell rightly decries the bigoted asshats that Wallander has to put up with, but he also has dim view of contemporary immigration policies, or at least the policymakers there's a chapter where Wallander phones an immigration officer who refuses to acknowledge the government's failure to account for a shamefully large amount of refugees and somehow fails to realize that anything's amiss. I gather that it was a sensitive issue in 1991 Sweden, and it probably still is, though it's far more evenhanded than I remember it being. In what I hear is the grand tradition of Scandinavian crime fiction there's a great deal of social commentary, mostly concerning immigration in this case.

#FACELESS KILLERS BOOK REVIEW LICENSE#
Latent xenophobes immediately latch onto the wife's dying word, "foreign", and thinking it gives them license to act on their hatred, begin a slew of racially motivated crimes that keeps the police department's hands full. The idea of rereading any crime fiction book wasn't an immediately attractive one, because where's the fun in a mystery that you already know all the answers to, but somehow I liked it far more having reread it.įaceless Killers/ Mördare utan ansikte, the first in the Wallander series about a detective based in the southern Swedish town of Ystad, has Kurt Wallander investigate the double murder of a farmer and his wife. Then I got wind that Scandinavia's a happening place for the genre, picked up this book, and read a lot of and before the subsequent and ongoing fantasy binge. well, whatever I could find in the basement and the occasional texts from English classes that particularly struck me.

In the early days before I discovered crime fiction I was more into.
