Jo Nesbø is a well-known and very popular writer of crime thrillers, and while his name was familiar to me, I had never read any of his books. On a recent visit to the library, I checked out several current bestsellers that were vaguely familiar to me, in the hope that I might at least like one of them sufficiently enough to read through. (This is something I have been doing a lot lately.) Of the five or so bestsellers I picked up this time around, The Kingdom by Jo Nesbø was the last one I attempted to read, after giving up on the others. At over 550 pages, the length of the book was daunting, but a thriller is usually easy to read, and I was prepared to give up on the book the moment it started to get uninteresting.

Surprisingly, that never happened with The Kingdom – it held my attention all the way through. While I would not call it “unputdownable” – which is understandable given that it is not a mystery thriller – it did get quite addictive towards the end, and I actually went back to re-read the last few chapters again to soak in the atmosphere. And really, “soaking up the atmosphere” is a very apt way of describing the book as it provides such a vivid feel of the location where it is set – which is a quiet mountain town in Norway. The Kingdom is the story of two brothers, Roy and Carl, and the series of tragedies and deaths that they are associated with, starting from when they were in their teens up to the present moment, where they are in their mid-thirties. Twenty or so odd years ago, their parents were killed when driving a car that went out of control on a sharp bend and plunged down a mountainside close to where they lived. They still live there (it is “the kingdom” of the book title), and during the course of the story, there are two more accidents of exactly the same kind, causing others related to the brothers to also get killed. Were these accidents, or suicides, or had the cars been tampered with? And if so, then why?

Caught up in the intrigue are also several people in the town where they live, including ex-girlfriends, the sheriff, the mayor, the editor of the local paper, the doctor, and others who have a fraught relationship with the brothers. Also central to the story is Carl’s wife, Shannon, who is the architect of the hotel project he has come back to his hometown (after many years in the US and Canada) to pitch to the townsfolk, and she is very Howard-Roark-like towards her creation. (Howard Roark is the eponymous hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, an architect who is so obsessed with the purity of his architectural designs that he would rather destroy projects that are not true to his vision than let them be built.) An additional complication arises when Roy falls in love with Shannon, throwing a wrench in the close relationship between the brothers.

While it might seem like a lot is happening in The Kingdom, I actually found that the novel did not seem rushed in the least; rather, it was able to get into events in great depth and describe them in minute detail. It is also beautifully written, with lush descriptions of the Norwegian countryside and of the depth and complexity of Roy’s feelings, from whose point of view the story is narrated. Above all, I was blown away by the fact that I was reading an English translation of the book from its Norwegian original. I did not realize this originally and had to go back and recheck the cover page to determine that it was indeed a translation.

Reading The Kingdom does not want to make me rush out to read all the booksJo Nesbø has written so far, but it’s good to know that if I am ever in the mood for a beautifully written crime thriller, I know where to look.

The Kingdom
Author: Jo Nesbø
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publication Date: November 2020

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Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.