When Kurt Wallander is suddenly wakened from an erotic dream at 5:13 a.m. and summoned to the scene of a crime outside the village of Lunnarp, he thinks the whole thing might be little more than a senile farmer's overactive imagination. But when he finds an elderly couple brutally tortured, the husband dead and the wife barely clinging to life, and no apparent motive for the murder, he knows he has the case of his life. And the timing couldn't be worse. His wife has left him, his daughter won't speak to him, and his father is drifting into a resentful, disoriented old age. Wallander is eating badly and hardly sleeping, putting on weight and suffering from his own anxieties about aging. "You flabby piece of shit," he says to himself. "Do you really want to look like a pitiful old man?" [p. 27] The investigation itself is quickly stalled, and just when it seems things can't get worse, racial tension flares as a refugee camp is set on fire, and, just days later, a Somali refugee is murdered. Now, with the press breathing down his neck and the Swedish government applying pressure to protect the refugees from an increasingly hostile public, Wallander has two crimes to solve. One theory and one suspect after another turn out to be dead ends, but Wallander is tenacious. Digging for facts and following his hunches, he brings himself not only closer to solutions but also closer to danger.

With a keen eye for the nitty-gritty of real police work, a sure sense of the psychological dimensions of his characters, and a clear grasp of the political and racial turmoil in contemporary Sweden, Henning Mankell delivers a tour de force in Faceless Killers.