Slow to start, but eventually it gets moving ( )

The Kingdom is NOT a happy book. On fact, it's pretty devastating to read. The whole plot is very Shakespearean, and Roy is our flawed hero.

I have to say, I was rooting for Roy till the very end. He's a character with whom is very hard not to empathize, even if we don't really want to. ( )

A different type of book than Nesbø's usual, but another dark Scandi thriller with largely unlikable characters that barrels along with such a pace that it's hard to put down. ( )

Thriller gigantesco, adictivo y complejo, que retrata las pasiones humanas: adrenalina literaria. ( )

I began to hate the protagonist when I read this, early in the book:
"I placed one hand on dog's head and he licked my wrist. I grabbed him by the skin on the back of his neck and with my other hand slit his throat. But I was cautious, nothing happened. Dog just jerked. Not until the 3rd attempt did I manage to cut through properly, and then it was like what happens when you make the hole too low in the juice cartoon, the blood came pouring out as if it had been just waiting for the chance to get free."

" 'in Norwegian we say love makes you blind.'
'Aha.' She gave a low laugh. 'but that's even more precise than my English Love is blind. Which people use in the completely wrong way anyway.'
'they do?'
'they use it to mean that we see only the good side of people we love. But actually it refers to the fact that Cupid wears a blindfold when he shoots his arrows. Meaning that the arrows strike at random, and it isn't us who chooses who to fall in love with.' "

Kurt Olson, the son of the previous sheriff, who the protagonist's brother Carl pushed over the edge on top of their parent's car, wants to make things difficult for Carl trying to build his hotel, because he's always had a suspicion that Carl is his father's murderer.
" 'it's about the time line on the day my father disappeared," said Kurt Olson. 'you said he left opgard at 6 o'clock. Is that right?'
'it's a long time ago now,' said Carl. 'but yes, if that's what it says in the report.'
'it is. But signals received by the base stations show that my father's phone was in the area around your farm until 10 that evening. After that there's nothing. It could be that the battery ran out, someone removed the SIM card, or the phone was damaged. Or that the phone was buried so deeply the signals no longer carried. What it means is, we have to check the area around the farm with metal detectors. It means that nothing up there should be touched, and that starting date I've been hearing about will have to be postponed until further notice.'
'Wh-what?' Stammered Carl. 'but...'
'but what?' Olsen stopped by the hot dog stand, stroked his mustache and looked calmly at him.
'how long are we talking about?'
'Hmm.' Olsen stuck his lower lip out and looked as if he was calculating. 'it's a large area. 3 weeks. Maybe 4.'
Carl groaned. 'Jesus, Kurt, that's going to cost us a fucking fortune. We've got contractors coming in at agreed times to do their work. And the frost-- '
'I'm sorry,' said Olsen. 'but investigations into a suspicious death can't take your desire to turn a profit into consideration.' "
So, what do the brothers do? Find a way to go down to the bottom of the cliff, and search for the sheriff's phone. And get rid of it. And that's what they do. Nothing stops these guys.

The book goes back and forth in time; that's how the reader finds out what the heck is going on.
When their father won't stop molesting Carl, Roy tells Carl that he'll take care of it. And the mother has to be taken care of too, because she "loved him" too much to do anything about it:
"We saw the brake lights on the Cadillac flare. They're connected to the pedal, so even if the brakes don't work the lights do. Their speed increased. Carl made a sound. I could see in my mind's eye dad turning the wheel, hear a scraping noise from the steering column, feel the steering wheel turning and meeting no resistance, having no effect on the wheels. And I feel pretty sure he understood it then. I hope so. That he understood and accepted it. That he accepted it included mum, and that the sums added up. She could live with what he did, but not without him.
It happened quietly and with a strange lack of drama. No desperate pounding on the horn, no scorching Rubber, no screams. All I could hear was the crunching of the tires, and then the car was just gone. And the golden plover sang of loneliness.
The crash from Huken sounded like the far-off rumble of delayed thunder. I didn't hear what Carl said or shouted, I just thought that from now on Carl and I were alone up here in the world. That the road ahead of us was empty, but all we could see right now in the dusk was the mountain in silhouette against the sky colored orange in the west and pink in the north and south. And it seemed to me the loveliest thing I had ever seen, like a sunset and sunrise both at the same time."

Carl used to have the local rich girl, before he screwed up and fucked her best friend. That's when he had to leave to go to study in the United States. When he comes back, and the local rich girl has married a guy from out of town, Carl talks to Roy about how her husband hates him:
" 'keep him on his toes. That's what they're like.'
'who's they?'
'oh, you know. The Mari Aaases and Rita Willumsens. They suffer from Queen syndrome. That's to say it's us, the male drones, who suffer. Of course even Queens want their physical needs satisfied, but the most important thing is for them to be loved and worshipped by their subjects. So they manipulate us like puppets in their fucking schemes. You get so fucking tired of it.'
'aren't you exaggerating a bit?'
'no!' Carl put his beer bottle down hard on the windowsill and two of the empties toppled over and fell to the floor. 'real love doesn't exist between a man and a woman who aren't related, Roy. There has to be blood. The same blood. The only place you find real, selfless Love is in the family. Between brothers and sisters and between parents and their children. Outside of that...' He gestured expansively, knocked over another bottle and I realized he was drunk. 'forget it. It's jungle law. Every man is his own best friend.' By now he was snuffling. 'you and me, Roy, we're all we've got. Nobody else.' "

I need to remember this part, whenever I get so down that it's hard to face another day:
"I carried on walking eastwards. Through sleeping streets, towards the EI8. It began to rain. And for once it was proper rain. My shoes were squelching as I set off across the half kilometer of the Varoddbro bridge over to Søm. Halfway across it occurred to me that there was actually an alternative. And I was already soaking wet. I peered over the edge at the greeny-black Waters down below. 30 metres? But already I must have started to doubt, even before my head began telling me I would probably survive the drop, and the survival instinct would kick in and I was splash my way to shore, almost certainly with a few broken bones and damaged organs that wouldn't mean a shorter life, just an even more shitty life. and even if I was lucky enough to die in the water down there, was there really anything to be gained in being dead? Because I had just remembered something. The answer I gave when the former sheriff asked why we should go on living when we didn't enjoy it. 'because being dead may be even worse.' And once I'd recalled that, I remembered what Uncle Bernard had said when he had been diagnosed with cancer. 'When you're up to your neck in shit, best not to hang your head.' "

That's all I'm going to put in this review for now. I like this writer a lot, and I have read other books of his, and I will read more. But this book only rated three stars for me, and I'm not exactly sure why. It's something to do with the relentlessness of the protagonist and his brother: just killing everybody that got in their way. But that's probably something that happens when you've been molested as a kid. And then Roy had to keep on protecting his brother Carl from the violence that he had inside of him. Which caused Roy to have to be violent. ( )