Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

He could feel his stomach churning. I'm repressing things, he thought. Along with everything else I don't have time for. I'm searching for the slayers of the dead and can't even manage to pay attention to the living. For a dizzying instant his entire consciousness was filled with only one urge. To take off. Flee. Disappear. Start a new life.

He stepped onto the little dais and welcomed his audience to the press conference.

-Faceless Killers

An elderly farmer wakes up in the middle of the night, struck by the sense that something is wrong. Gradually, he hears the faint cries from his neighbor's home. He walks into the horrific aftermath of violence - a man dead, his wife hanging on by a thread. She makes it to the hospital, where she utters her last word: "Foreign."

Inspector Kurt Wallander is lead on the case, in the absence of his superior officer, Björk, who is on holiday. It's a devil of a case, with virtually no leads besides the woman's last word, the meaning of which makes Wallander uneasy - there has already been local trouble with the refugee camps, and he hesitates to pursue a course of action that could stir up more unrest. Meanwhile, he struggles with a host of personal issues: his recent divorce, his terrible diet, his father's deteriorating mental state, and the distant relationship he has with his daughter.

Interestingly, despite these issues, Wallander is not quite as morose as I found him to be in the later stories I've read. Instead, he's angrier. The one time he gets teary, he notes that he can't remember the last time he's cried (which, boy howdy, simply cannot be the case in the later books unless he has a truly lousy memory). It made me feel a bit worse for him, honestly, to see that he has become so miserable - of course, I think he, like a lot of characters (paging Dr. House), would not be nearly so interesting were he content.

I'm now even more excited to read the intervening books, and see exactly how events shaped Wallander into the detective he has been in more recent years. I am going to have to start tracking down the original Swedish sequence of books (they weren't released in order here) and putting things on hold at the library.

Up next: I've started reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. While it's obviously not as engrossing as a mystery, I'm enjoying it so far. I also checked out a real grab-bag of books at the library, but I'll save those for another day.