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Evidently all is not well with Sweden's welfare state experiment. "What is happening in this country?", Wallander asks despairingly. In "The Man With the Mask", an elderly woman has been murdered while serving in her shop on Christmas Eve. Had the victim swallowed the stones prior to his death? If so, why? In the course of his sleuthing, Wallander is himself stabbed, with almost fatal consequences. Precious stones were discovered in his stomach during the autopsy. A retired sea captain has been found knifed to death in his flat. Here, a chill fog envelops southern Sweden, creating a winter "landscape of death" as the 21-year-old Wallander attempts to solve a murder while off-duty.
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Mankell's fiction has always intimately linked landscape and weather with plot, and the opening story, "Wallander's First Case", is no exception. Spanning two decades between 19, the five stories chart Wallander's "unknown" early years as he progresses from keen police academy graduate to disillusioned senior investigator with Ystad homicide. Meanwhile, The Pyramid offers a handful of Wallander stories mostly set in the investigator's hometown of Ystad on the southernmost tip of Sweden, a blustery, treeless landscape which Mankell calls "a Baltic Texas". Over the next few weeks, Kenneth Branagh will star in BBC adaptations of three of the novels.
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#Faceless killers plot series#
Despite the gloom, however, the eight-book series has sold in excess of 30m copies. From his debut in Faceless Killers (published in Sweden in 1991), Wallander is a miserably divorced, shambolic character who indulges in ever more despondent talk of his (and Sweden's) demise. Grumpy detectives are a staple of the genre, and Wallander is fabulously grumpy. Mankell's lugubrious Swedish detective, Inspector Kurt Wallander, is one of the most impressive creations in crime fiction today. The Danish thriller radiated an unfamiliar polar chill, but it was Henning Mankell who kicked open the door for the Nordic whodunit. T he trend for detective fiction from Scandinavia began in 1994 with Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.