Changes

|title=Faceless Killers

|author=Henning Mankell

|date=September 2002

|isbn=0099445220

}}

When Inspector Kurt Wallander is summoned to an isolated farmhouse one freezing January morning he thinks that it will be nothing more than a routine call-out. Instead he finds that the elderly farmer, Johannes Lövgren, has been brutally killed and his wife is near death. All that Maria Lövgren can tell the investigators before she too dies is that the killers were foreign. When the press get hold of this there's a tide of racial hatred, and Wallander is left with a double murder to solve as well as the responsibility for the protection of an unknown number of asylum seekers.

The book was originally written in Swedish in 1991. It doesn't feel like a fifteen-year-old book though as some of the issues, such as asylum seekers and immigration are as relevant today. It was translated into English by Steven T Murray in 1997. I can only judge the quality of the translation by considering the prose as published - I have no way of comparing the English version with the original Swedish. Some of the later Wallander novels are translated by Laurie Thompson and I thought that Thompson produced a better, more flowing text than Murray. It didn't mar my enjoyment of the novel though.

unnatural places and there are even occasions when words are joinedtogether. These aren't isolated incidents; there are sometimes several on a page. When I read I don't want to notice the text - it's like breathing - you should only notice it when there's something wrong. I've had a similar, but not so extreme, problem with another Wallander novel published by Vintage. I've never before deducted a star because of poor editing but this is deserved as it's an intrusive problem.