This was a brilliant read. As soon as I started reading this book I just knew I was going to love it. Highly recommended

‘The forgotten dead’ by Tove Alsterdal is difficult to review as I did really enjoy many parts but really struggled with others.

Positives
- The storyline, An investigative journalist goes missing whilst investigating people smuggling in France and his frantic wife, who turns out to be a badass travels to France to find him.
- The character development of the 2 main characters and how much you root for the “good guys”.
- This novel takes you to America, France, Spain and Portugal and the detail whilst in each new country is admirable.

Negatives
- For being 300+ pages it read like 700+ pages. I found parts really repetitive, dragged out and unneeded.
- The main 2 characters were developed well but that’s as far as it goes. Other characters ran throughout the story and I got quite confused as to their role.
- I hate lose ends and I feel this novel wasn’t tied up well enough with a pretty little bow for me. Many things were still left unfinished.

This thriller won Swedish crime novel of the year so as much as it wasn’t to my taste it may be to yours. It wasn’t an awful read but it wasn’t the best either.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free ARC in return for an honest review.

This book was originally written in Swedish, and then translated for our pleasure.
Patrick is a journalist who has travelled to France to write and investigate the trafficking of people in Europe. He then goes AWOL, and his pregnant wife tries to find him.
Interesting tale and worth the effort.

Really enjoyed this first novel! I loved that the story became something that I hadn’t been expecting from the cover. Alena’s story - an American woman who travels to Europe in search of her missing journalist husband - is really gripping. The modern day slavery storyline is topical (even if it may have been written a few years ago) and the characters engaging and believable. I liked the clever way the author created plot twists that challenged our presumptions about Patrick’s heritage and motivations. Brilliant writing and can’t wait to read more from this author.

I did enjoy this book, but found myself wondering how much more I had to read, as I felt it was about an hour too long. However it was different, but once again I did feel that this was a bit far fetched that a set designer could suddenly unearth all that information about her missing husband. I was a fairly good read though quite well written

Great storyline and plot with a believable investigative journalistic slant. Told from the perspective of a missing journalists pregnant wife, who takes it on herself to follow in his footsteps to Paris, Lisbon and southern Spain. With moments of intrigue and suspense the story reveals the trafficking and exploitation of illegals and although the resolution is lacking in detail, extreme and beyond belief, on the wholei did enjoy the tale!

Ally Cornwall sits at home in New York wondering why her husband Patrick has failed to keep in contact with her. He is an investigative journalist and his passion for his work, in particular those who are exploited, sees him travelling to distant and far places. A worried Ally decides to board a transatlantic flight, heading for Paris where she hopes to find answers as to the plight of her beloved Patrick.

Tove Alsterdal, is a Swedish author, who in The Forgotten Dead has written a novel preferring to rely on American lead characters. This does not work for me and I found the whole experience somewhat disappointing with a plot more akin to a B movie or a made for television series. I find it difficult to comprehend that within a very short time of arriving in Paris, she was able to establish the work that her husband was involved in before he disappeared. Equally preposterous was the speed at which she easily identified and interviewed those bad men involved in the notorious imprisonment and exploitation of illegal immigrants. It's not a badly written story and to its credit it tackles and confronts some very unsettling social issues that affect us all. Of course you the reader really want to know what befell Patrick and I certainly will not disclose that to you, suffice to say this was neatly accomplished making me feel that the reading of this novel had not been a waste of my valuable reading time. I received a gratis copy in exchange for an honest review and that is what I have written

There's an important story at the heart of this novel about people trafficking and the exploitation of immigrants - the problem I found, though, is that if you've watched any of the excellent documentaries, or read the in-depth investigative articles from the quality press then this feels predictable and unsurprising.

I always have a bit of a credibility problem when an ordinary person, like Ally, with no investigative skills or background (she's a theatrical set designer!) suddenly starts travelling around the world uncovering vast criminal networks. That and the slightly padded writing style which delays things at the start made me impatient...

That said, I'm sure many other readers will find this hard-hitting, emotive and even educational - undoubtedly an important topic, just not really the novel for me.

As I'm only lukewarm about this I'm not posting reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, this is just feedback for you. Thanks for the ARC!

This stunning novel is a dark, disturbing, immersive experience of the dangerous and ruthless world of human trafficking and the exploitation and expendable lives of undocumented immigrants. Tove Alsterdal is a Swedish writer who writes in the vein of Swedish-Noir but with American central characters in Ally and Patrick Cornwall. Patrick is a freelance Pulitizer nominated journalist who has travelled to France to write an exclusive story of the below the radar precarious lives of trafficked people in Europe. Ally is his wife, a set designer, who has just discovered she is pregnant. Whilst being used to Patrick not being in touch when he is on assignment, his absence without communication is longer than normal. A concerned Ally goes to visit the editor, and becomes aware that Patrick has used their baby money to finance his exclusive. She receives a letter, notebook and photographs from Patrick, and takes them with her to find out what has happened to him in Paris. We only see Patrick through the eyes of others and Ally.

Ally arrives in France and chips away until she begins to slowly piece together Patrick's actions and movements prior to his disappearance. In Tarifa, Spain, a young Swedish girl, Terese Wallner, has sex with Alex on the beach, and awakens in the morning to find her passport, money and shoes stolen. She is traumatised to discover the dead body of a black man in the sea water, the assumption is that this is a migrant from a boatload coming from Africa, other bodies are found nearby. Migrants making the trip from Africa find themselves on a boat where they are treated with merciless inhumanity. Ally is Alena Sarkanova, from the Czech Republic, with a father she knows little about. As Ally meets Sarah Rachid, and her brother, Arnaud, she learns of arson in which 17 migrants die, amidst whom were men that Arnaud and Patrick had hidden away. The body count rises around Ally as she comes ever closer to the truth. Ally's attempts to find a path towards justice are thwarted at every turn by ruthless powerful elite forces. As Ally hits rock bottom, she embarks on a personal route to gain some measure of illicit justice.

Tove Alsterdal has written a powerful, emotionally shattering novel that makes you question the humanity of an Europe that provides succour to such malignant forces in society. Alsterdal has done her research on this macabre topic superbly, she has utilised what is happening in our contemporary world with the incoming migrants to create a compelling narrative that never lets you go. It travels unsparingly into its heart of darkness, where lives are treated as disposable commodities, where the most disturbing abuses take place, such as rape, in a world there is no recourse to justice or any acknowledgement that migrants are actual human beings. Ally finds herself in places she never expected to be, whilst having to pave a path for her survival and for the hope that is her unborn baby. A brilliant and heartbreaking read that I highly recommend. Thanks to HarperCollins for an ARC.