Outstanding. Absolutely worth the wait and the hype! Thank you so much to NetGalley, Jo Nesbø, and Crown Publishing for this ARC of Macbeth. I had never read a Nesbø novel, and after devouring Macbeth, I'm a fan! 5/5, will absolutely recommend to friends.

I generally greatly enjoy Jo Nesbo's work but this retelling of Macbeth is too contrived for me. It reminds me of some UK friends who compete to write memos in the style of favorite authors. I will not review it online.

This is a great romp of an adaptation for fans of both Jo Nesbo and Macbeth. The latest in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, Nesbo takes Macbeth into a 1970s world of crime. Macbeth is the head of SWAT in a city overrun with criminals and a drug called "brew". The plot is dark and well-written as a police drama. Nesbo easily weaves the plot of Macbeth into this updated version. It took me a little while to get into it, but after that I was hooked.

A Hogarth Shakespeare tragedy

Ms. Nesbo is the latest bestselling author to have been commissioned to retell a tragedy originally written by Shakespeare and to spin the tale in a modern way for the a 21st century audience, he chose Macbeth.

“Macbeth “is a thriller about the struggle for power. In Mr. Nesbo’s version the main character “Macbeth”, is the leader of a Swat team in a coastal city where crime is rampant. After a drug bust that went terribly wrong Macbeth and his team must clean up. Power and money becomes the main character’s ambition. He is soon plagued by hallucinations and starts to unravel. In order to get what he thinks is rightfully his, Macbeth does the imaginable….

Nesbo’s revamp is an intricate and dark plot weaved in intrigue, passion and the fallibility of the human mind. It is also a gripping drama that enfolds out of guilt, ambitions and moral conflicts. The story is well-written as a police drama the author is known for. It is a hard book to get into with its multiple characters to get to know and a story that is filled with conspiracies and murders to track of; it is not an easy read. It took quite some time before I managed to piece everything together but mid-way without even realizing it I was totally hooked and I could not put this book down so intrigued to see what would come next I kept pushing forward and I could honestly say that by the end I enjoyed this tragedy.

This dark and gritty crime noir fiction is an excellent addition to join the list of books retelling Shakespeare’s plays by well-known authors.

3 stars

This book is Jo Nesbo’s contribution to the Hogarth Project of re-telling Shakespeare’s plays. Luckily for the reader, Mr. Nesbo chose to do it in crime-writing style. I didn’t like this book as well as Mr. Nesbo’s other works, but perhaps that it just me. It is set in the 1970’s.

Macbeth is in charge of a team that pursues drug kingpins. The town they police is a run-down semi-industrial area that has little to offer. One of the casinos is run by Macbeth’s girlfriend Lady.

This book has it all: murder, mayhem, deceit and your usual backstabbing. In a almost derelict town, there’s not much else to do except get high and commit crimes in order to get high again.

It is well written and plotted as are all of Mr. Nesbo’s novels. The action begins immediately and continues, albeit a little slowly, throughout the book. I am not sure I liked Macbeth, although I imagine it is difficult finding one’s way in a corrupt police department. I will continue to follow Jo Nesbo.

I want to thank NetGalley and Crown Publishing/Hogarth for forwarding to me a copy of this book to read.

I am a big fan of the Harry Hole series but have a difficult time getting interested in another character. This is a dark and brooding book and I’m sure it will have a big following because of its wonderful author.

A rainy, drug-infested industrial town in the 1970's is the setting for this Hogarth Shakespeare retelling. Duncan is the new police commissioner, a ray of hope among the corrupt powers that be, Inspector Duff is the vain, ambitious head of Narco, a Duncan man. Hecate is a drug dealer with an up-and-coming homemade brew (and three witchy messengers). And Macbeth, heroic, big-hearted commoner and former junkie is the head of SWAT (soon to be promoted, of course)--and in thrall to the older, beautiful and powerful proprietor of the posh Inverness Casino, Lady. Police procedurals aren't my favorite, but can't argue with the appropriateness for the story. More obvious and direct than some of the other Hogarth reimaginings.

Thank you Net Galley for the free ARC. In the Hogarth Shakespeare series, modern authors use their own writing styles to recreate one of Shakespeare's plays. Nesbo did Macbeth and lucky for us, he wrote it as the crime and mystery drama that he is known for.

Duff, Banquo and Macbeth all work for crime units and are pursuing drug smugglers. When "Cawdor" mills himself because he is suspected of being involved in the drug smuggling, Macbeth gets a promotion to run the unit. Duff is unhappy about this, because he is not sure of why they killed Cawdor and because he wanted the promotion for himself.

Lady edges on Macbeth to kill Duncan,so he can climb even higher in the police unit. He stabs him while he is staying at the casino and blames the bodyguards for being tied to the drug gang.

All in all, this book well represents the ambition of the Scottish play. I was not as involved int he characters as I am in the Nesbo crime stories, but good effort.

Hogarth publishers have commissioned a number of current writers to redo some of Shakespeare’s plays by setting them in modern times with modern characters. The assignment can be very tricky. Jo Nesbo has undertaken to reprise Macbeth, with limited success, in my view.

Instead of contending for the crown of the Kingdom of Scotland, the characters joust over control of the police department of a seedy town. This trope might work for some stories, but Macbeth involves serial murders and a blood lust for power that is plausible when the prize is a kingdom (especially one as beautiful as Scotland), but seems too much a stretch when the prize is a merely better paying job with moderately increased perks and prestige.

Nesbo strives mightily to retell the Macbeth story in modern guise. Nearly all the characters have the same names as in Shakespeare’s opus. There is even an appearance of three witch-like characters who prepare a potent brew of amphetamines [to be marketed to junkies] not unlike the witches’ brew in the original. I could overlook Banquo’s naming a son Fleance, but I just could not buy into Lady (yes, that’s her name: just "Lady") convincing her boy friend, Macbeth, that he must murder his boss, Duncan, if his career is to get any traction.

I lost interest in the book and did not finish.

I read this to practice my Norwegian, which is good, because this is Nesbo, never a subtle writer to begin with, clumsily hammering the plot of McBeth into a the hellscape of a deindustrialized Scottish town over-run by drug lords and corrupt cops. The plot is paint by number from Shakespeare, with the effect of making the Bard's rich characters into cardboard standups, especially Lady McBeth, who is now a mob moll.

I was excited to learn that Jo Nesbo had been tapped to provide the latest in Hogarth's updated Shakespearean series, and he did not disappoint. With his trademark attention to detail, even to the most minuscule, he brings Macbeth into the 20th century '70's literally with a bang. Having seen many productions of the original, it is the play I'm most familiar with, and Nesbo's signposting of characters in the choice of their names was spot on in this depiction of desire for power and resultant guilt. Here, Macbeth heads up a swat team in a disintegrating seaport where the only industry is production of "brew," a highly addictive meth like substance, controlled by Hecate, an evil manipulator of bodies and souls and owner of one of the two casinos. The other casino is owned by Lady, Macbeth's lover. As in Nesbo's signature style, plot and blood flow unabated from page one, and if I had one criticism, it was that there was maybe far too much description, slowing the action rather than propelling it, and bloating the leanest of Shakespeare's tragedies into almost 500 pages.

Thanks to Netgalley and Hogarth for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

For several years now, modern authors, acting under the auspices of the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, have reimagined Shakespeare's classic plays some 400 years after he wrote them. Before reading this book I was entirely unfamiliar with either the Hogarth Project or any of Nesbo's books.

Let me be entirely frank when I say that Nesbo hit a grand slam with this amazing noir-filled literary masterpiece. For those who know MacBeth, it's all here from the grimy foggy moors to the haunting dreams to the three witches of prophesy to the deaths escalating till there's few left to the Lady MacBeth washing her bloody hands over and over again till they are scraped raw.

But the genius of Nesbo's work here is that, even if you put Shakespeare aside, it's a powerful feast of dark gritty crime fiction, delving into waves of power-hungry madness, guilt, betrayal, and loyalty. From the very first pages setting the stage in this stagnating old industrial town where the harbor is filled with rotting carcasses of rusty freighters to the back alleys filled with drug addicts desperate for their next fix, this book is tremendous. There's biker gangs and casinos and SWAT teams and a scramble for leadership in a rotting corrupt police department.

Every page is chock full of depth and meaning. The first Nesbo book I ever opened, but absolutely not the last.