Mankell faceless killers summary cracked#

In the first act, two men tortured, executed and set adrift in a life-raft are discovered and we’re treated to by-the-book police work complicated by leaks to the press and the focus of the foreign ministry. The Dogs of Riga is divided into neat thirds. That quote functions as a handy summation of basic plot. And now, all of a sudden, you seem to be the ones asking me for help – is that right? If so, it must be possible to put the request more simply, without making long speeches about social problems I can’t understand.” “I investigate real crimes that have been committed by real people… The Latvian police have asked me to help them to track down Major Liepa’s murderer, primarily by trying to find out if there is any link with the two Latvian citizens whose bodies were washed ashore on the Swedish coast in a life-raft. “Chasing after monsters is hardly the kind of thing police officers get up to,” he said tentatively, trying to excuse his ignorance. Changes which had no immediate effect on his own life left him unmoved. He usually voted when elections came round, but haphazardly, without any committed interest. His ability to grasp what was happening in Europe was practically non-existent: political goings-on had never had any place in his police officer’s world. Wallander tried to decide exactly what Upitis meant by that, but he knew in advance that he was wasting his time. This would be great except for the fact that it crushes its hangdog, barely bilingual, “when did my life not suck?” protagonist under the weight of its global concerns.Ī mission that simply must be carried out. Inside this book you will be treated to drug trafficking, surveillance, secret meetings, illegal border crossings and all the thrills and paranoia that come with “man on the run” plotlines. Mankell upped his ambition considerably between the books and as in 1992 the state of the Soviet Union was on everybody’s minds so he wrote about the vestiges of the regime hanging on for grim life in Latvia (Riga being the capital thereof, in case you didn’t know). Mankell’s realist intent perfectly matched the contents of Faceless Killers but does a far more erstwhile job of it here.

I suspect the same will be true of the second Wallander mystery, The Dogs of Riga, although being more outlandish in plot I did enjoy it a little less. The modern mystery, as accredited to Edgar Allan Poe, has always been more in love with bafflement and complexity than with the small wonders of realism and my respect to Henning Mankell for waiving the rules and letting the dying word “foreign” damn well mean “foreign” remained strong in memory long after I forgot how stilted the prose was.

Mankell faceless killers summary cracked#

There was no eureka moment that cracked the case, just patiently following leads, watching the case get cold and following them again while waiting for new information. So I read Faceless Killers a year or two back and what I remember most fondly about it was how bog-standard the police work was.

Once again I have proved myself useless at theme blogging with a 4th of July book review of a Swedish detective novel…