“It’s partly about money, partly about being stabbed in the back.”

73. The Dark Heart – Joakim Palmkvist

What stuck out most to me about this book were the skills of the Swedish cadaver dogs. Did they find Mr. Lundblad? Yes and no. They found where streams of water had carried molecules of his body. Such sniffing skills. I was thinking about them when watching the Danish series The Investigation on HBO recently again, since that depicts Swedish cadaver dogs once again (and they used the dogs who really did the searching in the show) smelling such small amounts of person-smell through water, in that case a much larger amount of water and coming from much smaller parts of a person. It’s amazing that technology can improve so much, but cadaver dogs are still really the best at this sort of thing.

The Dark Heart covers the murder and efforts to solve it, but in not the usual way. Swedish landowner Lundblad’s murderer is who you expect it to be if you’re familiar with the usual motivations for murder – money -, but it really ends up solved because of the relentless efforts of one woman, Therese Tang. Tang is a woman who has had many occupations and investigates missing persons, taking it to the forest in search parties and talking to families who are actually worried about their missing people – unlike Mr. Lundblad’s daughter and her boyfriend from the rival farm (which isn’t doing very well). It’s a different cut of true crime and that’s not just because it involves forestry.

Morty may not have been good for finding cadavers, or truffles, but he could hear the fridge open and whistle for produce from several rooms away.