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Scandi-noir true crime. It's well researched and written with enough twists (especially for those of us who were not previously familiar with the case) to keep you guessing.

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I've really begun to love non-fiction thrillers. However, this one was just not for me. It really didn't need to be as long as it was and could have been better as an article or short film.

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Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC copy of this title in exchange for an honest review.
Well, that was a rollercoaster of a read! I know fairly little about police procedure in Scandinavian countries so this was a real eye-opener in that respect. This tale really shows that truth is stranger than fiction! I wouldn't have believed an investigation, with so much clear incriminating activity by the suspects, would be stalled. The human aspect of it was fascinating and Terese is brave, although perhaps a bit foolhardy. There were time I wanted to shake her for being so trusting in order to get the information.
This is a wild ride from beginning to end. The writing style is fictionalised in parts, as Palmkvist admits, to make the story read well, which I'm not sure was needed to the extent that it was written. However, it was a great read. It's started me onto the whole genre! I will definitely recommend to our many crime fiction readers as I know they will enjoy it.

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This book was well written, at times I couldn't stop reading and other times was hard to stay engrossed. I haven't read any true crime outside of the USA so that was interesting to me.

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This is based on a real life case in Sweden. It must have been very frustrating for the family of the victim that it took such a long time for the murderer to be brought to justice.

The author obviously has done a lot of research but I normally read fiction and I'm not sure that true crime is for me.

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I want to thank NetGalley and the publisher for providing a free ARC of this e-book.
The truth is that I didn't finish it. I am now convinced that the so-called true crime genre is not my cup of tea. The main positive characteristic of the book is that it contains an abundance of information concerning the Swedish socio-political status quo, the emphasis being given in the legal and justice issues. The story itself though couldn't retain my attention enough to even finish it. It is like reading a crime fiction, police procedural novel with the differentiator of course being that the narrated events are true and took place a couple of years ago. The pace that the story unfolds is excruciatingly slow and I found myself being bored to death around the first third of the book. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the author, Joakim Palmkvist, is one of the most well-known investigating journalists in Sweden and is considered to be one of the top crime reporter in the Scandinavian country. Of course I couldn't recommend a book that I didn't even complete but perhaps ''The Dark Heart'' will appeal more to the true crime fans.

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The Dark Heart: A True Story of Greed, Murder, and an Unlikely Investigator by Joakim Palmkvist is a highly recommended true crime story.

Late in the summer of 2012, Sara, the oldest daughter of Göran Lundblad reported several days after the fact that her father was missing. Göran was a millionaire landowner in Sweden and everyone who knew him found it highly unlikely that the man would just leave without a word to anyone or after his business affairs were all settled. The investigation and search lead to nothing even after there was a phone call to investigators implicating Sara's involvement from Göran’s youngest daughter Maria. She made it clear that Göran was not pleased with Sara and her boyfriend, Martin. He was sure Martin's interest in Sara was due to her family's wealth and a long-simmering dispute between the two families. Other people shared the same information. With no clear evidence the case went cold.

Then Therese Tang became involved. She is a driven, hard working woman and the mother of three, but more importantly she leads a branch of Sweden's Missing People, a group that assists in searching for anyone who is reported missing. Therese begins a search for Göran that eventually leads to a dangerous situation. Much of her success is due to the fact that she was able to discern that what was being said wasn't true through the body language, speech, and actions of Sara, but especially Martin. She put her own safety at risk to crack the case.
There is no real mystery to solve in this true crime story since it is obvious who did it from the beginning. What is interesting is the background information and the way in which the case was solved. While the actual book, which may suffer from some problems with the translation (I'm not a translator, but the book didn't flow quite right) would perhaps receive a recommended rating, I bumped it up to highly based on some of the interesting facts in the book, including those that compared and contrasted the legal system and law enforcement investigations between Sweden and the USA.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of the publisher/author via Netgalley.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2018/11/the-dark-heart.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2608911725
https://www.librarything.com/work/22360228/reviews/161225986
https://twitter.com/SheTreadsSoftly/status/1067843330053152768

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At summer's end in 2012, an older, miserly farmer went missing from his farm in the Swedish countryside. The surrounding region is dubbed the "dark heart of Smaland," in reference to its traditional conservatism and religious background. Palmkvist points out that it's an apt expression for this story, at the heart of which is whether a long-standing squabble over disputed land between two farming families, the Lundblads and the Tornblads, played a role.

Goran Lundblad, the missing man in question, ran a farm and foresting operation in Norra Forlosa and had accrued considerable wealth thanks to his business and the family generations before him. He's not exactly a sympathetic figure as all his dealings came to light and as portrayed here, but he's no villain either.

He lived mostly alone after two marriages, with one of his daughters, Sara Lundblad, assisting in the family business. She comes under suspicion because of her Romeo and Juliet-like romance with a son of the neighboring farming family, the Tornblads. They were long a thorn in Goran's side because of the land dispute and he wasn't particularly accepting of his daughter's relationship.

In addition to the narrative of the crime as its details slowly became known, the book includes the Lundblads' back story and their financial maneuverings, plus a parallel story: that of Therese Tang, the "private investigator" who was key in cracking the case even after it had gone cold.

Therese ran a branch of an organization called Missing People, which recruits volunteers for missing persons search efforts. They searched unsuccessfully for Goran when he was first reported missing, and Therese would later assist in bringing the crime to its resolution in a very unorthodox way. Despite this significance, the book puts the spotlight on Therese and her background mysteriously often.

The excitement seems to be over the fact that she had been a model and worked in the modeling industry, like doing makeup, so was an outsider to criminal justice. She held other jobs too, more than I can name, the details of which were related for reasons I'm not clear on. The number of times we're reminded she was a model is ridiculous. It felt like this should have been long-form journalism or a profile piece as it's clear the author considered Therese one of the most interesting angles of the story, and if you agree, you're sure to enjoy the book; if not, it's going to drag sometimes.

The case must have been sensational in Sweden, I think in no small part because of Therese's involvement, as Palmkvist writes: "How the case was solved - thanks to a private investigator who put herself in harm's way to find the truth and convict the perpetrators - really raised the interest from mere curiosity to public frenzy." It's interesting and unusual, absolutely, but I didn't understand the frenzy.

My biggest pet peeve is that Therese is repeatedly called an investigator. She's not, she's a witness. Someone who hears or is told a confession is a witness. And she ran a branch of a volunteer search group but that's still not an investigator. Swedish justice system quirks aside, she's not a professional or "private investigator" (the author constantly refers to her as such) in any sense. It irked me.

There are also points where added detail does nothing to enhance the story ("It was exactly 22 minutes and 48 seconds past 11:00 p.m. on June 17 when Therese's phone buzzed" was a particularly annoying example) and elsewhere a lack of detail hurt it. While the investigation clusters around Sara, whose story, behavior and relationship with a family enemy initially drew suspicion, Goran has another daughter, Maria, who first raised the alarm about him being missing. They were genuinely close, talking on the phone the last night of his life, as they often did for hours at a time - but she's someone who gets lost in the primary pursuit of Therese's bland story and retracing threads of the crime. Which is ok sometimes, it was mostly interesting to read the investigation narrative, but I'd have rather learned more about Maria than Therese.

The most interesting and worthwhile element is what the book reveals about the Swedish criminal investigation and justice systems, including some historical tidbits about past cases I'm now curious about. For a country that provides the scenery for so much crime and detective fiction but doesn't have much violent crime in reality, any story about these systems is appealing. But I can't imagine that the methodology (or lack thereof) that Therese employed would've gone over well in an American courtroom, if not ended up torpedoing the case for some form of persuasion.

I say that with zero legal background, I could be very wrong (I know you'll tell me if so, internet) but the whole thing was eyebrow-raising and made me more uncomfortable than impressed. In the end it served its purpose and was legal, so it helped bring closure and justice to what might well have remained unsolved. I'm criticizing too much considering those things, but uncomfortable was how I felt.

The afterword begins with a Clue: The Movie-like line: "This book constitutes one of many possible versions of a long and complex history and a gruesome crime." I suppose that's thanks to some ideas about the crime being creatively told, and these sections were very compelling to read, but I'm always bothered by not knowing which parts of what I've just read were true or not. It's by no means a bad read, I found it page-turning and often very absorbing, but had more potential.

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The Nordic Noir genre is so popular right now that it is interesting to read a non-fiction version. the Dark Heart is the true story of the disappearance of Goren Lundblad in 2012. It was a good book and one of the things I liked the most is that I got to learn about the laws in Sweden. As an American where the crime drama is prolific on our TV it is always interesting to read about how other country's legal systems work.

The story is not always told in a chronological fashion because some of the chapters revolve around elements of the story like the inheritance or blood. This does occasionally take some work to remember when you are in the story (which occurs over two years).

If you are a crime story fan I would definitely recommend this book.

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The Dark Heart: A True Story of Greed, Murder, and an Unlikely Investigator
This is the story of a missing Swedish millionaire, Goran Lundblad who has a couple of farms and other properties. Before he went missing, he’s been trying to convince his daughter Sara, who lived and worked with him, to get rid of a boyfriend she’d acquired that has become a bone of contention between them. Finally, Therese Tang gets involved, a mother of 3, former model and security guard, who is an investigator for a missing persons group. She won’t take no for an answer and risks her neck. I thought the narration was quite decent, the man was great at pronouncing all of the tricky place and people names that I often wondered how they looked in text. The story while a little predictable, is still a good one, although there is a bit of padding. It’s an enjoyable true crime book on audio, well performed. I would choose to read the book from the cover description.

I read the ebook after listening to the Audible, just to check out all of those names I couldn’t quite understand during the Audible reading. It’s kind of like the second time watching a movie, where you pick up on things you didn’t quite get the first time through. I probably should have done this in reverse, but I hadn’t really planned to do both until I reached the end of the Audible and was so curious about so many spellings of the foreign names. My thanks for the advance electronic copy that was provided by NetGalley, author Joakim Palmkvist, and the publisher for my fair review.

Ebook/ Narrator – Ulf Bjorklund / Translator – Agnes Broome
AmazonCrossing 314pages Pub: Nov 1st, 2018

Audible Audiobook / Narrator- Ulf Bjorklund /Translator - Agnes Broome
Brilliance Audio 9hrs 13mins Pub: Nov 1st, 2018

RATING: 3.5/5 Stars

My BookZone blog:
https://wordpress.com/post/bookblog200.wordpress.com/1039

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