Rob Recommends Faceless Killers

Ingredients: Flawed main character. Palpable and exotic setting. Emotional social issue. Brutal crime. Crackerjack detective work. Mix the ingredients together and you've got a modern Swedish crime novel. There's a reason why they've gained recent popularity in the U.S. and other parts of the globe. They're good. And the ingredients are variable enough that the novels (even the series) don't present as formulaic. So it's in this context that we're given Kurt Wallander, homicide inspector from Ysad, faced with a cruel double murder of an elderly rural couple. The story takes place in a Sweden that seems cold and barren, both physically and culturally. And the murders are set inside a cauldron of simmering anti-immigrant emotion. Faceless Killers is the first Kurt Wallander book translated into English. The detective has also been the hero of Swedish movies and TV shows and a British TV films.