The Kingdom by Jo Nesbø is a title sent to me by the wonderful people over at Penguin Random House.

My first encounter with Jo Nesbø was when I read The Snowman – the seventh of the Harry Hole series. Despite it being part of a series, I didn’t feel like I missed too much.

Jo Nesbø’s dark, gripping new standalone thriller, The Kingdom, tells the story of two brothers, and a homecoming that turns deadly bringing long-buried family secrets to the surface.

jonesbo.com

The Kingdom, three stars

The Kingdom took some time to fully engage my interest. There are some twists and turns and unexpected revalations. Roy is a difficult charachter to like, but in the end he was the most likeable of them all (for me, anyway). He is smart, a man with good intentions, but not necessarily a good man. Carl is, in the current narrative littered all over social media, trash.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as The Snowman and only gave it three stars. I think Jo Nesbø is a great writer. Maybe he’s an equivalent of our own Deon Meyer, who also has a detective series. But as I’ve only read one of Meyer’s books, I’m really not the authority. I plan to dig into the rest of Harry Hole’s adventures soon.

Roy and Carl have spent their whole lives running from the darkness in their past, but when Carl finally returns to make peace with it, the two brothers are inexorably drawn into a reckoning with their own demons.

goodreads.com

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