the kingdom book review

Kongeriket #1

The kingdom, jo nesbø , robert ferguson  ( translator ).

560 pages, Hardcover

First published August 27, 2020

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Jo Nesbo’s New Book Stars an Antisocial Loner. It’s Not Harry Hole.

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By Charles McGrath

• Nov. 6, 2020

THE KINGDOM By Jo Nesbo

The Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbo is famous for his series of best-selling books featuring the detective Harry Hole. The name (pronounced HOOL-eh) is actually quite common in Norway, and has nothing to do with absence or emptiness. All the same, the English connotations are more than appropriate. In the great tradition of Scandinavian crime fiction, Harry is damaged goods: alcoholic, quarrelsome, antisocial and suspicious of authority; in the course of a dozen novels he gets beaten up so often that by now he’s missing a middle finger and has a scar running from his mouth to an ear. In “ Knife ,” his last appearance, he woke up blood-soaked and hung over, convinced he had killed his own wife. For all his flaws, though — or maybe because of them — Harry is very good at his job, which has him pursuing monsters and psychopaths of a sort that in real life hardly ever turn up in law-abiding Scandinavia: serial rapists and serial killers, right-wing psychopaths and, in one recent book, a guy who likes to bite his victims with iron dentures and drink their blood .

At least some fans of the series will be disappointed, therefore, to learn that Harry is absent from the newest, much tamer Nesbo, “The Kingdom.” The closest this book comes to Nesbo’s customary darkness and luridness is a brief scene in which a character disguises himself by wearing the scalp of a dead man whose corpse is later dissolved in a bath of a cleaning fluid called Fritz. And although it’s set in a mountain village in rural Norway, “The Kingdom” in some ways seems more American in tone than Scandinavian. The difference is established right from the beginning, when one of the main characters comes rumbling up to his family’s mountain farm in a 1985 Cadillac DeVille. This is Carl Abel Opgard (the middle name comes from Abel Upshur, Zachary Taylor’s secretary of state, but we’re probably meant to think of the biblical Abel as well), newly arrived, with his beautiful Barbados-born wife, from Canada, where he established himself as a real estate big shot. He has plans now to make a killing and also boost the failing local economy by building a sleek, modernist spa and hotel on the remote family homestead.

We learn all this from the book’s narrator, Carl’s older brother, Roy, who stayed behind when Carl went to college in the States, making a modest living by managing the local service station. Roy keeps to himself, doesn’t say much, is mostly interested in birds and in fixing up old cars. He seems so uninterested in women that some of the locals suspect he must be gay. He’s also a much more leisurely storyteller than the one who narrates the Hole books, and in the beginning the book seems less a mystery story than a Faulknerian saga about sibling rivalry and sexual jealousy.

[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of November. See the full list . ]

But there is a dark family secret, it turns out — one that Carl and Roy have been covering up for years — and, instead of one mystery, lots of them. Why is there another Caddy DeVille, containing the bodies of the Opgards’ parents, at the bottom of a nearby ravine? Suicide? Flat tire? Or just a treacherous road? (By the end of the book, two more cars will wind up there, including a snazzy Jaguar E-type. You would think a nanny state like Norway might want to put up a guard rail.) And what happened to Sigmund Olsen, the sheriff investigating that first car wreck? Another suicide or accidental drowning? In the present, there’s the puzzle of why the local roofer is buying so many morning-after birth-control pills; and eventually an arson case to be solved, after someone burns down the uncompleted hotel. Could the culprit be someone who just can’t stand looking at a building that has been variously described as a cellulose factory and a lunar igloo? (Carl’s wife, Shannon, is the architect, and she proves to be a small-time Howard Roark, unwilling to let her design be defaced by anything cute or folksy.)

The person trying to sort all this out is Kurt Olsen, Sigmund’s son, who has taken over his father’s job. He affects a kind of Western manner, with cowboy boots and a handlebar mustache, and even resembles a John Ford character, stubbornly poking around, revisiting old clues, refusing to consider a case closed, especially the death of his father. He’s convinced the Opgards know more than they let on, and won’t stop pestering them.

If there’s a subtext here, it’s the narrowness and meanness of life in a small Nordic town, where everyone knows everyone’s secrets, or wants to, and where the past is never past and old animosities linger for generations. One reason so many Americans like Scandinavian crime fiction, I suspect, is that it evokes a world so reassuringly different from the urban, tasteful, design-loving socialist paradises we sometimes imagine and envy. Nesbo’s Norway, like Stieg Larsson ’s Sweden, is populated with creeps and psychos of the sort that turn up here in much greater abundance. “The Kingdom” seems familiar in another way: Just like America, Norway has places where people drink and smoke too much, eat a lot of fast food and don’t see much of a future for themselves. That’s why the locals are taken in by Carl’s somewhat sketchy and grandiose plans: They promise a new beginning.

I think Nesbo also means to suggest that this rural Norway is a place of great natural beauty. The trouble is that he’s not very good at describing it — or Roy isn’t. He says things like “The sky was heavenly blue and as clear as the gaze of a pure young girl.” For a narrator, I’d rather have Nesbo. Roy isn’t unreliable, exactly. He doesn’t falsify or hold back. Eventually everything comes out, even if he keeps you in suspense for a while. About halfway through, for example, he at last owns up to his romantic history. But he has a blind spot when it comes to himself. He has a propensity to violence, for example, which doesn’t seem to trouble him much. And though he’s essentially a decent man — everyone says so — he remorselessly puts his family above everything.

Unlike the Hole books, which tend to start with a crime, gruesome usually, and then relentlessly pursue it, “The Kingdom” begins slowly and only gradually picks up speed, until Roy is swept up in the momentum of his own story. The ending is sudden and startling and — to me, anyway — a bit of a psychological stretch. To get your head around it you have to question everything you thought you knew about the two brothers. The ending also puts you in the morally compromised position of hoping that justice won’t be done. In the much more violent Hole books evil is always exorcised, however briefly, and for that reason they’re much more comforting.

Charles McGrath is a former editor of the Book Review.

THE KINGDOM By Jo Nesbo Translated by Robert Ferguson 549 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.99.

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clock This article was published more than  4 years ago

Jo Nesbo’s ‘The Kingdom’ is a suspenseful bundle of Norwegian noir that’s almost impossible to put down

You don’t have to be a Buddhist to recognize the bad karma accumulating year by year for the Opgard brothers, Roy and Carl, in “ The Kingdom ,” a dense, suspenseful bundle of Norwegian noir by Jo Nesbo , the author of the esteemed Harry Hole police detective series. Melancholy, alcoholic Harry is nowhere to be found in the remote village of Os (not a typo). Instead, it’s Kurt Olsen, the equally downcast town sheriff, who is certain these two generally well-liked village chaps — their parents died when the boys were in their late teens and Dad’s beloved Cadillac DeVille flew off a cliff — are clever homicidal connivers. The constable is right, of course, for what little good his investigatory brainpower does him against a couple of sociopaths.

At 549 pages, “The Kingdom” (named after the Opgard’s family farm) feels as much like a miniseries as a novel. You’re so curious about what the next episode will bring that even if you’ve stepped away from the book for a meal or a good night’s sleep, you feel like one of those 19th-century readers who stormed the New York Harbor, awaiting the arrival of a new installment of a Dickens novel.

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The sometimes droll, sometimes eerily affectless, occasionally enraged narrator is Roy, the older brother, a mechanic who runs the Os convenience store and gas station. A few people in town think Roy is “in love with” the younger brother he protects from bullies and other annoying villagers. It soon becomes apparent, though, that the ongoing nonconsensual incest that sets an increasingly ugly chain of events in motion is of a different sort.

While brutal emotional injury is at the center of the novel, social change is what keeps the Opgard family saga churning. A new expressway threatens to bypass the town and leave livelihoods in the lurch. It’s Carl who comes back from college in Minnesota and a real estate career in Toronto with a plan to save Os’s economy. He wants to build a 200-room tourist hotel on the Opgard grazing land, and his scheme is to finance the project with local villagers putting up their property as collateral. If you think uh-oh, you’re right.

I have no doubt there are some lovely people in Norwegian mountain villages, but the people of Os are by and large a sad lot — gossips, drunks, molesters, shysters, egomaniacs, jealous lovers, arsonists and people willing to shove an honest man off a cliff to keep a secret.

Scandinavian noir is famous for its gore, and while “The Kingdom” isn’t lacking in that department — a man is scalped, and his hair placed over the head of someone else to disguise their identity — most of what’s grisly here is psychological. There’s some excellent Albee-esque relational to-ing and fro-ing among Roy, Carl and Shannon, the wife Carl brings to Os from Canada. Roy falls head over heels for his sister-in-law, and she for him, and their trysts are both wild and fraught.

Most of Nesbo’s characters are wracked with guilt — for good reason. Roy tells himself that “a minor theft, a trivial rejection — you never get over. They’re like lumps in the body that get encapsulated but can still ache on cold days, and some nights suddenly begin to throb.” Carl, though, is less bothered by conscience. Of selling one’s soul, he says, “It’s always a buyer’s market when it comes to souls.”

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Why do mentally healthy readers want to spend time with these godawful people? Writers like Nesbo have that knack for instilling just enough humanity in their miscreants that we keep hoping they might, if not repent, then at least acknowledge their moral scuzziness. Or, being morally imperfect ourselves, we sort of hope they don’t get caught — at least not yet. Think Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Walter White in “Breaking Bad.”

Buddhists — and any number of Presbyterians — will know that “The Kingdom” can only end in one way, and most souls will find Nesbo’s finish both a relief and — don’t look while I flagellate myself — a bit of a disappointment.

Not at all disappointing is the great bulk of this generally mesmerizing novel, including its occasional wit. Such as a scene where a corpse is being disposed of in a grotesque manner while the car radio in the background blasts Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” It’s one of the great moments in modern crime fiction.

Richard Lipez  writes the Don Strachey PI novels under the name Richard Stevenson.

The Kingdom

By Jo Nesbo

Knopf. 549 pp. $28.95

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Book Review: The Kingdom by Jo Nesbø

An in-depth review of The Kingdom by Jo Nesbø: Two brothers. One town. A lifetime of dark secrets.

Jo Nesbø will probably always be best known for his Harry Hole series of ‘detective narrowly avoiding his own demise’ books.

But quietly, outside of the fanfare of the series that gave us The Snowman – one of the best books I’ve ever read – he’s been busy.

Little by little, Nesbø has been building a separate body of work that is as different from the unorthodox detective as Lofoten is from Oslo. His latest entry into this canon is The Kingdom and it might just be his finest work yet.

As always with these long-form book reviews , I’ll be delving into spoilers at some point. I’ll let you know when that comes. Firstly, I’ll start you all off with a little overview of what The Kingdom is about.

Order The Kingdom with free worldwide delivery on  Book Depository . Also available from  ARK (Norway)  and  Amazon .

Overview of The Kingdom

Two brothers Roy and Carl Opgard, grow up with their parents – one America-obsessed and the other a tame housewife. They live on a large but mostly barren farm in the mountains, that their father refers to as The Kingdom.

Roy is the strong, silent type who takes after his father. Carl is the shy, sensitive type who takes more after his mother.

We meet the boys at a young age. Carl is desperate to show his father that he’s a strong boy. He goes out hunting but somehow never quite has the courage to pull the trigger and kill anything.

One day, Carl goes off on his own with the family dog. Roy hears a gunshot and shortly afterwards Carl comes running. He takes Roy to see the poor dog, wounded badly but still alive. Roy takes Carl’s knife and puts the hound out of its misery.

Together, they agree to pretend that it was Carl who did it – a show of strength for their father. His father pretends to believe them and then, quietly, points out to Roy that if he’s going to lie in future, he might want to wash his hands first!

Carl to the rescue?

Fast forward to the modern day and Roy is still living on the farm. He’s awaiting the return of his beloved brother from several years of living in the US. Carl duly returns with his new wife in tow. Together they settle in to the master bedroom while Roy relegates himself to the room that the boys shared as kids.

The small, quiet mountain town where everybody knows everybody and the economy ticks over is seemingly in jeopardy. Plans are afoot to build a new highway that will pass them by completely.

This news is especially bad for Roy who runs the service station in the town. Over the years he’s built up a regular flow of customers by being the only option for many city-folk heading to their cabins.

Read more : The Best Norwegian Crime Books in English

Carl, however, has a plan to save the town and put it firmly on the map. All he has to do is convince the residents of the town to invest a small amount each, with the promise of huge rewards once the resort opens.

Being the charismatic prodigal son that he is, he easily manages to persuade enough investors. But not everyone is convinced.

The local sheriff, for one, is very suspicious of the plan, and also suspects not only that Carl is not being completely honest about the deal but also that some accidents from the boys’ past might not be as accidental as they seemed.

Overall impressions

The Kingdom is a change of pace for those familiar with the Harry Hole novels, where it’s rarely long before you find yourself in the middle of the action. Here it’s much more of a slow burner, taking time to set the scene.

One thing Jo Nesbø does very well is to build and describe a world that’s at once familiar and believable. Even if you’ve never set foot in Norway in your life, you’ve almost certainly encountered a sleepy small town that’s one new road away from complete extinction.

On top of this, the characters are three dimensional and you understand how their actions are shaped by their experiences. So, even though the novel takes its time to create its world, it makes the payoff at the end that much more worthwhile.

If I must rate the novel, I’d probably give it 4 or 4.5 out of 5. This may be swayed by the fact that I’ve loved every word of every Nesbø novel to date! That said, if you like a slow-burning mystery novel where relationships are as important as events then you’ll struggle to be disappointed with The Kingdom.

I found it a real page-turner so even though it’s 500+ pages long, it won’t take you too long if you have the time to spare.

That gives you the plot summary and my opinion, now it’s time to delve into the details! If you carry on reading, you’ll encounter some spoilers . So if you want to read the book fresh, then head off now and come back once you’re done. Otherwise, read on!

Brotherhood

As you might expect, brotherhood is one of the primary themes of The Kingdom. The two brothers at the heart of the novel have a storied past and a complicated relationship. Roy, as the strong brother, is often involved in dealing with the mess left behind by Carl’s more sensitive side.

Right from the start, we see their relationship being tested. Carl brings his new wife, Shannon, on his return to The Kingdom and Roy is not entirely sure what to make of her. Eventually Roy’s relationship with Shannon develops to the point where they are in some ways closer than Carl and Shannon are.

Another major theme running in the background of The Kingdom is Americana. Roy’s father, and then Roy, are obsessed especially with the old classic cars like Cadillacs.

Roy can recognise the sound of Carl’s DeVille even before he sees it, when he’s returning to the farm for the first time.

Master of misdirection

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Nesbø’s writing, whether it’s a Harry Hole sequel or a standalone novel, is his masterful use of misdirection. The Kingdom is no exception. We know that Nesbø uses foreshadowing to give us ideas of what to look out ofr. All authors do it, though some are better than others.

Read more : Five Norwegian Novels to Read Before You Die

But with Nesbø in particular, he leads the mind in so many different, and often opposing, directions so you’re never quite sure which part will land, and which will have been a bluff. One of the best examples of this is a question I was asking myself a lot for the first half of the book…’what exactly is Roy’s hiding’?

Roy’s secret

From the start it’s mentioned or hinted that Roy has a dark secret. I’d imagine this will read differently for different people.

To me, Nesbø seemed to be suggesting that Roy was gay, living in a town whose small-minded community might not accept that. At one point he is asked directly by the sheriff and rather than denying or confirming simply bats the questions aside.

There’s even a hint that he might have taken the strongest possible actions to protect his secret from being found out. That possibly doesn’t chime with a hidden sexuality – it’s rarely worth killing for after all – but in Nesbø’s world, you never know what people will do with the right, or wrong, motivation!

From there, this develops into a suggestion that Roy might have been sexually involved with his younger brother as they were growing up. It becomes obvious that Carl was abused by someone, which doesn’t really fit with the relationship the brothers have.

But time can heal wounds, and the mind can suppress them. Maybe, now that Carl is a successful businessman, he has come back to get his revenge on Roy.

But it’s finally revealed that Roy had been having a years’ long affair with a married woman, Rita Willumsen, the wife of the local used car dealer and loan shark. 

Blood is thicker than water

As you will often find in books with a strong family theme, there’s often a test of that familial bond. Will Carl and Roy’s bond prove to be stronger than the bond they each form with Shannon.

As the book reaches its stunning conclusion and the final facts are dragged into the light, it’s still not entirely clear until the very end. How the brothers, divided by a woman who has starkly altered their relationship, will salvage or ruin their relationship is ultimately what drives this story to the final pages.

Cain and Abel

Another fine example of misdirection is the story of Cain and Abel. This is one of the best-known brotherhood stories in the Western world and Nesbø uses it to good effect.

In the bible story, Cain is a farmer and Abel is a shepherd. Both make sacrifices to God but God favours Abel’s sacrifice. Consumed with jealousy, Cain murders Abel. Cain is then sentenced to a lifetime of wandering in the Land of Nod.

Carl’s middle name is Abel, though we’re told it’s named after the former American Secretary of State Abel Parker Upshurr. Roy has the middle name Calvin after President Calvin Coolidge. It’s not quite Cain and Abel but it’s definitely close enough to bear in mind.

So, we’re being subtly set up for Roy to murder Carl out of jealousy. Indeed, this is a large amount of the misdirection that Nesbø employs. Is Roy clever enough to manage it and is Carl clever enough to avoid it?

The world’s most dangerous bend

“The Highways Maintenance Department had been on the point of erecting a crash barrier when they discovered the last 200 metres were private road and Opgard’s responsibility.”

Ultimately, the road leading to The Kingdom has a lot to answer for. One particular bend seems to encourage cars to disappear over the edge down a long was to Huken below. It’s so notorious that everyone is surprised that the town council never do anything about it, even though it’s on private land.

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The initial victims are the brothers’ parents who set out one day to visit the boys’ Uncle Bernard and up driving over the bend.

The sheriff investigates and can’t come to any conclusion as to why there are no brake marks. Was the boys’ father depressed? The sheriff never finds the answer but he’s never convinced it’s a simple matter of misjudging the bend.

Later, a car belonging to a Danish hitman goes careening over the edge after he’d confronted Roy at the farmhouse. That car, a Porsche, skids on ice that had mysteriously appeared overnight.

The final car is the ultimate spoiler, so I’ll save it in case you’re reading this before reading the book, but it brings KRIPOS to investigate and Officer Vera Martinsen provides the final closure on the bend and its secrets.

“For three cars to go off the road over a period of eighteen years at a place that should obviously have been better protected seems to me not merely reasonable, I think in fact it’s strange there haven’t been more accidents.”

Final conclusions

As with all standalone novels, we end with a final conclusion. There’s no room for a sequel and so everything is tied up nicely. Any misdeeds committed by our protagonists are wrapped and buried forever.

This allows us to spend our time with Roy and Carl and then earn a satisfying ending. A ‘real’ police officer from the city comes along and puts an end to the supposed mystery of so many cars falling off at the bend by pointing out that in fact there should probably be more.

So, after all is said and done, it was a health and safety issue all along. Who knows what might have become of Roy and Carl if the Highways Maintenance Department had installed a crash barrier!

Have you read The Kingdom? Tell us your thoughts below.

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2 thoughts on “Book Review: The Kingdom by Jo Nesbø”

I like Jo Nesbo’s work – although honestly I’ve only read the Harry Hole books.

Brotherhood – and the tension between the good brother and the evil brother – is a constantly reoccurring theme in his books.

Thanks for the review. I look forward to reading Kingdom.

The third car was a Jaguar not a Porsche as indicated here.

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THE KINGDOM

by Jo Nesbø ; translated by Robert Ferguson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2020

The illusions of a family and its close-knit town constructed and demolished on a truly epic scale.

The latest stand-alone from the chronicler of Inspector Harry Hole puts all the murky, violent twists on brotherly love that you’d expect from this leading exponent of Nordic noir.

Roy Calvin Opgard has always been joined at the hip to his kid brother, Carl Abel Opgard, though not in the ways you’d expect. Carl was clearly his father’s favorite, and years ago he left Norway for Canada, where he made quite the reputation as an entrepreneur, while Roy stayed behind to run a petrol station his dreams merely stretched to owning. When Carl returns to Os, it’s with a beautiful bride, Barbados-born Shannon Alleyne, and an ambitious plan to build the Os Spa and Mountain Hotel on land the brothers inherited when their parents plunged to their deaths in the prized Cadillac Raymond Opgard bought from conniving Willum Willumsen. But there’s more to Carl’s noble-sounding scheme to finance the project by distributing ownership shares among the townsfolk than he lets on. And Carl’s return to his hometown unearths long-simmering tensions between the brothers and threatens to reveal long-buried secrets about the deaths of their parents, the disappearance long ago of sheriff Sigmund Olsen, whose son, Kurt, now holds the sheriff’s job, and the checkered sexual histories of both Carl and Roy. Nesbø peels away the secrets surrounding Carl’s project, his backstory, and his connections to his old neighbors so methodically that most readers, like frogs in a gradually warming pan of water, will take quite a while to realize just how extensive, wholesale, and disturbing those secrets really are.

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-525-65541-1

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | THRILLER | INTERNATIONAL CRIME | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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NOW OR NEVER

by Janet Evanovich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2024

As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.

Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.

The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024

ISBN: 9781668003138

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024

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THE SILENT PATIENT

by Alex Michaelides ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.

"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

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Jo Nesbo’s The Kingdom - review: ‘As much like a miniseries as a novel’

Richard lipez reviews jo nesbo’s newest novel the kingdom and says the norwegian noir is impossible to put down.

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Y ou don't have to be a Buddhist to recognize the bad karma accumulating year by year for the Opgard brothers, Roy and Carl, in The Kingdom , a dense, suspenseful bundle of Norwegian noir by Jo Nesbo , the author of the esteemed Harry Hole police detective series. Melancholy, alcoholic Harry is nowhere to be found in the remote village of Os (not a typo). Instead, it's Kurt Olsen, the equally downcast town sheriff, who is certain these two generally well-liked village chaps - their parents died when the boys were in their late teens and Dad's beloved Cadillac DeVille flew off a cliff - are clever homicidal connivers. The constable is right, of course, for what little good his investigatory brainpower does him against a couple of sociopaths.

At 549 pages, The Kingdom (named after the Opgard's family farm) feels as much like a miniseries as a novel. You're so curious about what the next episode will bring that even if you've stepped away from the book for a meal or a good night's sleep, you feel like one of those 19th-century readers who stormed the New York Harbour, awaiting the arrival of a new instalment of a Dickens novel.

Most of Nesbo's characters are wracked with guilt – for good reason. Roy tells himself that “a minor theft, a trivial rejection – you never get over

The sometimes droll, sometimes eerily affectless, occasionally enraged narrator is Roy, the older brother, a mechanic who runs the Os convenience store and gas station. A few people in town think Roy is “in love with” the younger brother he protects from bullies and other annoying villagers. It soon becomes apparent, though, that the ongoing nonconsensual incest that sets an increasingly ugly chain of events in motion is of a different sort.

While brutal emotional injury is at the centre of the novel, social change is what keeps the Opgard family saga churning. A new expressway threatens to bypass the town and leave livelihoods in the lurch. It's Carl who comes back from college in Minnesota and a real estate career in Toronto with a plan to save Os' economy. He wants to build a 200-room tourist hotel on the Opgard grazing land, and his scheme is to finance the project with local villagers putting up their property as collateral. If you think uh-oh, you're right.

I have no doubt there are some lovely people in Norwegian mountain villages, but the people of Os are by and large a sad lot - gossips, drunks, molesters, shysters, egomaniacs, jealous lovers, arsonists and people willing to shove an honest man off a cliff to keep a secret.

Scandinavian noir is famous for its gore, and while “The Kingdom” isn't lacking in that department - a man is scalped, and his hair placed over the head of someone else to disguise their identity - most of what's grisly here is psychological. There's some excellent Albee-esque relational to-ing and fro-ing among Roy, Carl and Shannon, the wife Carl brings to Os from Canada. Roy falls head over heels for his sister-in-law, and she for him, and their trysts are both wild and fraught.

Most of Nesbo's characters are wracked with guilt – for good reason. Roy tells himself that “a minor theft, a trivial rejection – you never get over. They're like lumps in the body that get encapsulated but can still ache on cold days, and some nights suddenly begin to throb.” Carl, though, is less bothered by conscience. Of selling one's soul, he says, “It's always a buyer's market when it comes to souls.”

Why do mentally healthy readers want to spend time with these godawful people? Writers like Nesbo have that knack for instilling just enough humanity in their miscreants that we keep hoping they might, if not repent, then at least acknowledge their moral scuzziness. Or, being morally imperfect ourselves, we sort of hope they don't get caught - at least not yet. Think Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley and Walter White in Breaking Bad .

Buddhists – and any number of Presbyterians – will know that The Kingdom can only end in one way, and most souls will find Nesbo's finish both a relief and – don't look while I flagellate myself – a bit of a disappointment.

Not at all disappointing is the great bulk of this generally mesmerising novel, including its occasional wit. Such as a scene where a corpse is being disposed of in a grotesque manner while the car radio in the background blasts Whitney Houston's “I Will Always Love You”. It's one of the great moments in modern crime fiction.

The Kingdom by Jo Nesbo. Vintage, £20 .

Lipez writes the Don Strachey PI novels under the name Richard Stevenson.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the kingdom.

THE KINGDOM is a somewhat different book for Jo Nesbø. It is a stand-alone novel that has many more slow-boil elements than any of the entries in his Harry Hole series. However, those who have followed Nesbø from the beginning or arrived as latecomers to his work will find much to love here.

Roy and Carl Opgard grew up on a non-working family farm on a mountaintop just above Os, a tiny town in Norway. This is one of those places where everyone knows everyone else, as well as most of their business. Roy, the elder of the two and the narrator of the piece, has lived there his entire life, tending the farm that he and Carl inherited and operating a gas station that somehow manages to show a profit despite being off the beaten path. Carl put his hometown in the rearview mirror as soon as he was able to do so, attending college in Minnesota and eventually settling in Canada. So it is quite a shock when, without an immediately apparent reason, he comes back to Os with his wife, Shannon, after being away for 15 years.

"No one who reads THE KINGDOM will ever forget it or its author, who deserves a place at the summit of the must-read list of anyone who enjoys dark quality literature."

Carl’s return causes quite a stir in the town, especially with two ghosts of his Christmas past: Grete Smitt, who wanted her long-ago one-night stand with Carl to be something more, and Mari Aas, who was Carl’s steady girlfriend until she was not. That aside, Carl’s reason for returning home becomes clear rather quickly. He has an idea for developing the family farm into a large hotel resort and spa. Roy thinks that the artistic rendition of the project looks like an igloo on the moon, but he reluctantly finds himself --- as does most of Os --- sucked into the gravity of Carl’s incessant enthusiasm.

Actually, readers are tugged in as well, with no hope of escaping before the conclusion. One reason for this is a mystery that concerns the apparently accidental deaths of Carl and Roy’s parents, a mystery that spills out across the story in drips and drops, increasing the tension for the brothers. Another reason is Kurt Olsen, the local sheriff, whose father (the former sheriff) disappeared years before. Olsen is determined to fully investigate their deaths and is more inclined to do so since Carl has returned. Roy suspects that Olsen is even more obsessed with the disappearance of his father, which also seems to involve himself and Carl.

Meanwhile, Roy is drawn toward Shannon in spite of himself, a state of affairs that she seems to cultivate. THE KINGDOM intermittently bounces back and forth between the past and present, so while the plot that runs through the book is deceptively straightforward, every page or two contains a small revelation or surprise that intersects with others. This creates a tangle of intricate branches that cause the players to be revealed as much more complicated than they would seem. Just about every single person here is guilty of something, and you won’t want to become too attached to any particular character.

I thought that I had the ending figured out on multiple occasions and was wrong every time. Whatever disappointment I initially experienced upon learning that this was not a Harry Hole novel evaporated within the first few pages and never reappeared. No one who reads THE KINGDOM will ever forget it or its author, who deserves a place at the summit of the must-read list of anyone who enjoys dark quality literature. I also would be remiss if I did not offer a tip of the fedora to Robert Ferguson for his fine and nuanced translation, which picks up on Nesbø’s wondrous turns of phrase and gifts them to his English-speaking readers.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub on November 13, 2020

The Kingdom written by Jo Nesbø , translated by Robert Ferguson

• Publication Date: July 27, 2021
• Genres: Fiction , Mystery , Suspense , Thriller
• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
• ISBN-10: 0525564861
• ISBN-13: 9780525564867

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