faceless killers book discussion questions

By the end the necessary information has been gathered and the pieces fitted together. How good is Faceless Killers by this measure? It’s fine, I guess. Perhaps the “very best kind” of “terrific” thriller doesn’t need great prose, just an interesting and well-constructed plot (a double-standard, of course, as if genre fiction should not be expected to be well written in every respect). He gets the job done, but do reviewers really have such low expectations for crime fiction qua fiction that something so flat gets so much praise? On the night of the murder they had been staying in a boarding house in Bastad.

A man and a woman went on a robbery spree and then left the car in Halmstad. Naslund came back to work and succeeded in solving the problem of the stolen car. He found himself thinking about them in the plural.įor the next three days nothing happened. After the case meeting in the morning he had spent his time organising the hunt for the murderers in Lunnarp. that afternoon Wallander discoverd that he was hungry. Its starkness does seem suited, after a while, to the bleak landscape–both literal and emotional–of the novel, but that didn’t rescue it from seeming perfunctory, as writing, rather than artistic or literary: it often seemed as if Mankell was just working his way down a checklist of things to include or describe:Īt 4 p.m. Maybe the fault lies with the translators, but there is no elegance, no rhythm, no color to the prose at all: it’s just one statement after another. The style is almost unbearably plodding–not quite as dreary as the Stieg Larsson books (or the 1.5 of them I managed to wade through), but close. But I honestly can’t see why this book, or its author, would stimulate such enthusiasm. I’m not in a position to generalize about Mankell, or Wallander, after reading just one novel in this series. “An excellent thriller…A terrific novel.” ( The Independent ). “Beautifully constructed plots.” (New York Post). “A thriller of the very best kind.” ( The Times ). “An especially satisfying crime novel” ( Wall Street Journal). “Sweden’s greatest living mystery writer!” ( Los Angeles Times). My copy of Faceless Killers is littered with snippets of praise, both for Mankell in general and for the book in particular.

Faceless killers book discussion questions