The Dark Heart

A True Story of Greed, Murder, and an Unlikely Investigator

By: Joakim Palmkvist, Agnes Broomé - translator

Narrated by: Ulf Bjorklund

Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

A chilling true crime story of poisonous family secrets, love gone wrong, and a cold case that refused to stay buried....

In late summer of 2012, millionaire landowner Göran Lundblad went missing from his farm in Sweden. When a search yielded nothing, and all physical evidence had seemingly disappeared, authorities had little to go on - except a disturbing phone call five weeks later from Göran’s daughter Maria. She was sure that her sister, Sara, was somehow involved. At the heart of the alleged crime: Sara’s greed, her father’s land holdings, and his bitter feud with Sara’s idler boyfriend.

With no body, there was no crime - and the case went as cold and dark as the forests of southern Sweden. But not for Therese Tang. For two years, this case was her obsession.

A hard-working ex-model, mother of three, and Missing People investigator, Therese was willing to put her own safety at risk in order to uncover the truth. What she found was a nest of depraved secrets, lies, and betrayal. All she had to do now, in her relentless and dangerous pursuit of justice, was prove that it led to murder.

©2017 Joakim Palmkvist. (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. English translation © 2018 by Agnes Broomé.

The Dark Heart

It started out a slow read for me. But it was very detailed. Liked this book alot.

Struggled not to fall asleep

Would not recommend.
Had me agervated within the first five minutes.
Narration is confusing.
Difficult to understand

First try

It was a good story, but thankful it was free of charge, the book ,anyway. I was grateful to have the book read by a Swede; although, there was a certain franticness to the narrator's tempo in portions of the book that caused me to stop the book and walk away for days because it agitated or annoyed me, the narrotor not the book..

So interesting!

So interesting that I had to set limits on my listening times. Loved the narrator.

A good solid listen.

I think it took quite a lot of time to get to the actual crime, some of the set up could have been edited out.

Best of really big fans of Scandinavian noir

Look, if you are obsessed with Swedish crime and/or crime novels, of course you should pick this up. But the thing is that true crime is often far less satisfying than fictional crime because real life can be a lot messier than even the messiest of novels. Some great authors can pull true crime details together into a more coherent tale but I don't think this author is on par with the great true crime authors. There is lots of interesting detail in this, but it feels really scattered so I might give it a pass unless you are a huge fan of Steig Larssson or have a serious interest in the Olof Palme assassination.

true crime story

I must have purchased this as a deal-of-the-day. True crime is not one of my normal genres.

The book begins at the almost-end, and then jumps back to the beginning. Good plan, because the "almost-end" caught my attention. The beginning was confusing to this English-speaking American. So many similar sounding Swedish names of persons and locations to mentally sort through. By about 1/3rd of the way through, though who-was-who and where-was-where began to sort out. The story dragged in places, and was a bit too detailed in others. We pretty much knew who-dunnit, but how the authorities got to a conviction was an interesting story.

It was too drawn out. A little too clinical

It meandered between characters and time. Presentation was very clinical. Not the kind of book to keep you on the the edge of your seat.

The Dark Heart

In the beginning of this book(audiobook), I got a little lost and it kind of felt like rambling. After a while and a murder, I was catching on the the story line . Good ending, the narrator did what he could.

Swedish True Crime

This story is styled in the manner of giving factual information and then filling in the possible dialogue. This was an interesting case that included two not-too-bright criminals. I am not sure how they thought they were going to get away with murder. The entire case was interesting and I wish more American true crime podcasts would cover European true crimes.