Vintage The Kingdom

Very disappointing. I rarely give up on books. Usually finish them however bad they are. This is that rare time I have stopped on 70something... Book landed in a recycling bin to prevent anyone from having disappointment of their lives. Love Nesbo for Harry Hole & Headhunters but this one seems like a bad ghost writing. Avoid!

Always liked Jo Nesbo, the Harry Hole series is fantastic. His last stand alone book was Macbeth which got some pretty poor reviews but I really liked it. Kingdom is another stand alone one and yet again attracted some middle of the road reviews so I didn’t expect to much. I won’t comment on the story but 50 pages in I was really not looking forward to reading the rest of the book. It was intriguing but all a little disjointed and lacking in substance. From then however several things start falling into place, the story really starts to bite, the characters and all their various issues become interesting and you find yourself getting drawn in. The second half of the book is excellent with twists, turns and sharp bends throughout. Stick with and the rewards will come. Overall a really good book.

Oh dear, what a disappointment. I bought this book when it came out and after a few chapters gave up. I tried it again this week but it has gone back on my bookshelf and I think it will stay there. It is hard to believe that this book us written by the same Jo Nesbo who wrote the page turning and amazing Harry Hole series. What has happened? Please Jo bring us another exciting detective. I certainly will not be buying any more of his books until I read the reviews. Such a pity.

The Kingdom is a stand-alone thriller about two brothers, Roy and Carl Opgard, who live on a mountain farm near a sleepy Norwegian village and whose lives are tied together by dark secrets. There is an undercurrent of barely contained malice among the principal characters and as you’d expect from Nesbo the book does revolve around a series of murders.When their parents die in a car accident, teenage Roy is left as protector to his impulsive younger brother using his fists when necessary and gaining a reputation as a taciturn thug while Carl plays the field with the local girls. Roy finds work as a mechanic with his uncle and Carl goes to North America. Roy is left behind to look after the ‘kingdom’ and live peacefully as a successful petrol station manager.Carl returns some years later with a new wife, Shannon, an architect who will help Carl to build a mountain spa hotel on their family land. Carl promises to make Roy rich along with the rest of the villagers, who he convinces to become investors in the project.As the book progresses we learn about Roy and Carl’s affairs with various women in the village, what really happened to their parents and why, why Carl really came back from North America, and how Roy always seems to want what Carl has got despite him being the younger sibling.Anyone expecting any strong female characters will be disappointed. Shannon is painted as a rather typical femme fatale ultimately driving a wedge between the brothers. The other women in the village are rather two-dimensional and Nesbo spends far more time writing about the desires and motivations of the male villagers. In fact this bias is most noticeable when Roy, who is the book’s narrator, talks about his mother. She is so tied to their dominant and abusive father that she is a footnote in his demise.The Kingdom lacks the pace of Nesbo’s Harry Hole books and could have been between 100-200 pages shorter without losing any of the layers of secrecy, cover ups and mysteries. The revelations and final twist are also rather easier to guess than his usual books. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, don’t get me wrong, Nesbo is a great writer and it was nice to read something from him that wasn’t a Harry Hole thriller, and to see a story from a criminal’s point of view.

... still falls short on many levels. I read The Bat as I had read many reviewers say the Harry Hole series is a "must read" for those who like Nordic Noir (as I do). I rated The Bat 1 star - very poor, and very trite.The Kingdom was much better, although the longer it went on (it's over 600 pages), the more it felt like a story that should have stopped about 100 pages from the end.Up to about halfway through, I really enjoyed the book and thought it might turn out to be one of the best stories I had read in a long while. Nesbo managed to weave back and forth in the lives of Carl and Roy Opgard, two brothers with a dark past. Pieces of their story emerged gradually, and on many occasions the story took unexpected twists. Occasionally, it seemed a bit implausible, but not annoyingly so - until the latter parts of the story, where it started to hark back to The Bat in its lazy storytelling.Ideally, the last half of this story would be rewritten to match the engagement of the first half. It almost seemed like the author, similar to his protagonist, had gone so far down a road that he became desperate to tie up loose ends.