The Scottish play becomes a gritty detective drama in Hogarth's newest retelling. Penned by none other than crime veteran Jo Nesbo, the story of ambitious Macbeth and his rise to glory and fall from grace is moved to city streets where the thane becomes a detective, keen to rise up the ranks when events conspire to make him the head of organised crime and he is told by the lackeys of drug lord Hecate that he could become Chief Commissioner.

Nesbo does small detail incredibly well and the story feels almost cinematic with scenes that pan across groups in the city and an embellished cast of police officers and drug gangs. The story is well updated and modern bureaucracies allow for slightly fantastical plot twists - for example laws which facilitate the intrusion of other modern organisations.

It is a compelling tale with fleshed out characters, Nesbo takes underlying detail from the original play to give characters more back story, cleverly done with Lady Macbeth and her past, and then adds aspects such as Macbeth's drug problem and the back story to his relationship with Banquo. The novel would stand well simply as a novel if a reader didn't have prior knowledge of the play. However, having knowledge allows you to dig so much deeper into this narrative and gain so much more from it. It is a fairly straightforward retelling - more like St Aubyn's Dunbar than the much more complex Hagseed when comparing it to the others in the series, yet it achieves more than some of the other retellings in it's scale and depth.

The only aspect which was disappointing was the female characters, who largely conformed to stock types. Caithness was a very typical 'other woman' and was perpetually characterised in sexualised terms and while Lady Macbeth's story was brilliantly embellished she still proved to be little more than a hysterical, abused woman figure. Nesbo's chance to give us a variety of women lay in the figure of Hecate, traditionally 'Queen of the Witches' and it would have been an amazing twist and subversion to see a powerful female drug lord manipulating the male dominated playing field. However, we get a stereotypical masculine figure in this role and so Nesbo doesn't follow in Shakespeare's footsteps of breaking the mould with great and varied female characters, but falls into a common trap of stereotypes in crime fiction.

Aside from this the novel is enjoyable to read with a strong plot and is as detailed as it is expansive making it still a good effort at capturing one of Shakespeare's best loved tragedies more than 400 years later.

This book is for sure for Shakespeare lovers, and Nesbo lovers will also find some points they could like. At the beginning I was not so excited about the story, probably I was searching to much for the connection between the Drama and this modern adaptation. As I got used to it, it was easier to let the plot flow and not to search for common grounds. I like the way the author managed to adapt the story, so that it was plausible, but the old Shakespeare`s story was not lost. I was interested in reading how the ghosts wil be integrated into the story, such things don`t really fit the 70s industrial town. But I liked the solution. Jo Nesbo really knows his job!
What I didn´t like were the brutal killings (but I`m not the Nesbo fan) and Macbeth was not always fitting his role from the beginning of the book. But I can still recommed this adaptation.

Ok this was not what I was expecting - probably my fault for not reading the blurb properly though. I am a huge Jo Nesbo fan and love how he can weave an intricate thriller of a story - and this is no exception to that. A modern day retelling of Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' set in the world of drugs, organised crime and the police. The main players are all there and, ultimately the result is the same as the original, but slightly more fanciful I think. The story is tightly packed with action and intrigue as you try and figure out just who is working with the shadowy Hecate to bring down the police - every time I guessed someone something happened to prove me wrong so with a dwindling cast I finally figured out near the end.

This really is a very good read and one that many will enjoy, if you have never read a Jo Nesbo it's a good one to start with. The reason I only gave four stars is because I am a Shakespeare purist at heart and am not generally a fan of retellings but don't let that put you off what is an incredible read.

Many Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a preview copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book made me feel uneasy while reading it, not what I expected from a Jo Nesbo title. It was a complete change from the usual novels. Saying that I still had to read it very late to see what happened. The ending was not expected.

Thanks to NetGalley and to Vintage Digital for providing me an ARC copy of this book that I freely chose to review.
This book is part of the Hogarth’s Shakespeare project, a project designed to create novels based on some of Shakespeare’s original plays and bring them up-to-date thanks to best-selling novelists. Although I have been intrigued since I’d heard about the project (because I am a fan of some of the authors, like Margaret Atwood and Anne Tyler), this is the first of the novels to come out of the project that I’ve read. Evidently, the idea behind the series was to try and bring new readers to Shakespeare and perhaps combine people interested in the plays with followers of the novelists. My case is a bit peculiar. I love Shakespeare (I prefer his tragedies and his comedies to the rest of his work) but I can’t say I’m an authority on him, and although I’ve read some of his plays, I prefer to attend live performances or watch adaptations (I’ve watched quite a few versions of Hamlet, but not so many of the rest of his plays, by poor chance). I’ve only watched Macbeth a couple of times, so I’m not the best person to comment on how closely Nesbo’s book follows the original. On the other hand, I have not read any of the author’s novels. I’ve watched a recent movie adaptation of one of them (mea culpa, I had not checked the reviews beforehand) but, although I know of him, I cannot compare this novel to the rest of his oeuvre. So I’m poorly qualified to write this review from the perspective of the most likely audience. But, that’s never stopped me before, and this review might perhaps be more relevant to people who are not terribly familiar with either, Macbeth or Nesbo’s books.
From my vague memory of the play, the novel follows the plot fairly closely, although it is set in the 1970s, in a nightmarish and corrupt city (some of the reviewers say it’s a Northern city somewhere not specified. That is true, and although some of the names and settings seem to suggest Scotland, not all details match, for sure), where unemployment is a huge problem, as are drugs, where biker gangs murder at leisure and control the drug market (together with a mysterious and shady character called Hecate, that seems to pull the strings in the background. He’s not a witch here but there’s something otherworldly about him), where the train station has lost its original purpose and has become a den where homeless and people addicted to drugs hung together and try to survive. The police force takes the place of the royalty and the nobles in the original play, with murders, betrayals and everything in between going on in an attempt at climbing up the ladder and taking control of law-enforcement (with the interesting side-effect of blurring any distinction between law and crime), with the city a stand-in for the kingdom of Scotland in the original.
The story is told from many of the characters’ points of view (most of them) and there is a fair amount of head-hopping. Although as the novel advances we become familiar with the characters and their motivations, and it is not so difficult to work out who is thinking what, this is not so easy to begin with as there are many characters with very similar jobs and, at least in appearance, close motivations, so it’s necessary to pay close attention. The technique is useful to get readers inside the heads of the characters and to get insights into their motivations, even if in most cases it is not a comfortable or uplifting experience. The book is truly dark and it seems particularly apt to a moment in history when corruption, morality, and the evil use of power are as relevant as ever. (Of course, the fact that this is an adaptation of a play written centuries before our era brings home that although things might change in the surface, human nature does not change so much). The writing is at times lyrical and at others more down to earth, but it is a long book, so I’d advise readers to check a sample to see if it is something they’d enjoy for the long-haul. I’ll confess that when I started the book I wondered if it was for me, but once I got into the story and became immersed in the characters’ world, I was hooked.
The beauty of having access to the material in a novelised form is that we can get to explore the characters’ subjectivity and motivations, their psychology, in more detail than in a play. Shakespeare was great at creating characters that have had theatregoers thinking and guessing for hundreds of years, but much of it is down to the actors’ interpretation, and two or three hours are not space enough to explore the ins-and-outs and the complex relationships between the characters fully. I was particularly intrigued by Duff, who is not a particularly likeable character, to begin with, but comes into his own later. I liked Banquo, who is, with Duncan, one of the few characters readers will feel comfortable rooting for (Banquo’s son and Angus would fall into the same category, but play smaller parts), and I must warn you that there is no such as thing as feeling comfortable reading this book. I thought what Nesbo does with Lady is interesting and provides her with an easier to understand motivation and makes her more sympathetic than in the play (it is not all down to greed or ambition, although it remains a big part of it). No characters are whiter-than-white (some might be but we don’t get to know them well enough to make that call), and although the baddies might be truly bad, some remain mysterious and unknown, and they are portrayed as extreme examples of the corruption that runs rampant everywhere. Most of the rest of the characters are human, good and bad, and many come to question their lives and what moves them and take a stand that makes them more interesting than people who never deviate from the path of rightness. Macbeth is depicted as a man of contrasts, charitable and cruel, a survivor with a difficult past, perhaps easy to manipulate but driven, full of doubts but determined, addicted to drugs and ‘power’, charismatic and dependent, full of contradictions and memorable.
The ending of the novel is bittersweet. It is more hopeful than the rest of the novel would make us expect, but… (I am not sure I could talk about spoilers in this novel, but still, I’ll keep my peace). Let’s just say this couldn’t have a happy ending and be truthful to the original material.
Although I have highlighted several paragraphs, I don’t think they would provide a fair idea of the novel in isolation, and, as I said before, I recommend downloading or checking a sample to anybody considering the purchase of this novel.
Not knowing Nesbo’s other novels, I cannot address directly his fans. I’ve noticed that quite a number of reviewers who read his novels regularly were not too fond of this one. Personally, I think it works as an adaptation of the Shakespeare play and it is very dark, as dark as the plot of the original requires (and perhaps even more). It is long and it is not an easy-going read. There are no light moments, and it is demanding of the reader’s attention, challenging us to go beyond a few quotations, famous phrases and set scenes, to the moral heart of the play. If you are looking for an interesting, although perhaps a not fully successful version of Macbeth, that will make you think about power, corruption, good and evil, family, friendship, and politics, give it a try. I am curious to read more Nesbo’s novels and some of the other novels in the project.

It has has been more years than I care to divulge since I read Macbeth at school but remembered that I enjoyed it and along the Jo nesbo being one of my favourite authors I jumped at the chance of reading his new modern spin of the play. In this version we initially meet Macbeth, the reformed drug addict and head of swat. His lover, Lady owns a casino. We see a man with the strong conviction of right and wrong become corrupted with the greed of his lover and his depency on drugs increase with the help of head drug dealer Hecate. This is still set in Scotland but the modern twist sees the book relatable to the modern reader. This book had me intriguied rather than gripped on how the story would develop. Macbeths character did seem to be easily pushed to the dark side. He was happy killing his boss, his father figure, an his former best friend without any issue. I'm not sure a man would be so corruptable but this could be explained by the increase in drug use. Nesbos character development is brilliant, I shed a tear for Banquo and for Duff. This book really does do the play justice as you can see the slow decline of Macbeths mental health as the control from Lady and Hecate increases. Some parts did appear rushed but the book was very slow paced. This book didn't grip menas much as Nesbos previous work but I loved it none the less. It is an excellent retelling of a Scottish play

This is such a clever and compelling interpretation of the classic Macbeth story.
Turning Macbeth into a power hungry detective was a work of genius and while I'm not a huge fan of Jo Nesbo generally, this has definitely encouraged me to read more of his work!
I am a big Shakespeare lover and while I have heard that fans of his Harry Hole series were not impressed with this novel, I am in awe of the way Jo has crafted this around the play and maybe that is why I loved it so much.
It is a hard-boiled, crime noir on the outside but a literary feast on the inside.
Very impressed.

I feel conflicted on rating this one. On the one hand, fantastically dark and gritty retelling of Macbeth. Jo Nesbo's writing is amazing and it's hard not to get sucked into the world he has created. But equally...this was not my kind of thing. Rewriting Macbeth's ominous dreams as drug addiction made sense for the more realistic story Nesbo was trying to tell, but it didn't work for me. Why would Macbeth risk going back on drugs when he was just about to get everything he wanted? Plus it made the whole scenario with Macbeth believing Hecate's "prophecies" far less realistic to me. For me, the best moments were when Nesbo stepped completely away from the classic story and put his own details in: Jack the croupier, Angus and Lennox's stories were some of the most interesting bits for me. So if you're here for a gritty tale of corruption and violence, you're at the right place. But maybe not the best re-imagining of Macbeth ever.

I am a huge Jo Nesbo fan. I have read and reread the Harry Hole books. I liked the idea of this book but I just couldn't get into it. I persevered and read all of it. There are some really cleverly written bits but I expected more.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

A lovely re-telling of Macbeth that keeps the reader entertained. Both the writing style and the pacing of the story stand up and create suspenseful moments.

A brave, if not entirely successful adaptation. 3/5 stars.

Last year I read Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, a reimagining of The Tempest. This was my introduction to the Hogarth Shakespeare project for which several well-known authors have been invited to write adaptations of some of Shakespeare’s stories. When I saw Nesbø had written a version of Macbeth I thought it was a brilliant choice. He’s enjoyed great success writing dark stories and only an author good at wrangling darkness could successfully take on the Scottish play.

Like The Tempest, I also studied Macbeth at school, so I went into Nesbø’s adaption with fore-knowledge of what was going to happen. I’ll come back to whether this was a good thing or not later in my review.

There is a lot in Nesbø’s reimagining which is ingenious. How the characters and events of Shakepeare’s play are transposed into a 1970s’ police noir is clever and well thought-out. I was particularly impressed with how the author managed to incorporate the supernatural elements of the play into a realistic genre.

However, while I thought the novel was good, it wasn’t great. Firstly, one of the best things about Shakepeare’s Macbeth is its terrific economy. It’s one of his shortest plays, something which keeps the action rocketing along and holds audience interest. In contrast, Nesbø’s Macbeth comes in at just over 500 pages and several times I felt events were dragging along unnecessarily. But this may have a silver lining: the length of Nesbø’s story is the main reason I think readers who have no prior knowledge of the events of Shakespeare’s Macbeth may actual enjoy this retelling more because they won’t be waiting for certain events to occur; they won’t be wondering when on earth we’re going to get to the next big moment because they won’t see them coming.

Also, while Nesbø trying to pay homage to some of the original Shakespearean dialogue was a nice touch, I’m not convinced it worked when the characters were otherwise speaking naturally in modern-day English. In fact, the dialogue felt a little clunky in places.

Macbeth is a tragedy and, in performance, works or not depending on whether the actor playing Macbeth can make us feel sympathy for him before he starts committing foul deeds. We have to believe he was a basically good man who had potential to be a great one, but that circumstances and weakness led him down the path to evil. I didn’t get this sense with Nesbø’s Macbeth. In fact, I didn’t feel much sympathy for any of the characters and so wasn’t too bothered when things started to turn towards the tragic.

Finally, Shakespeare could write black and grim, but he also knew the value of a funny bit with a dog. While Shakespeare’s Macbeth is bloody and dark, it also contains one of the funniest scenes the Bard ever wrote, because Shakespeare wants to gives his audience a break from the unrelenting horror or the story. This comic relief, or even a glimpse of levity, was sorely lacking in Nesbo’s version which is unrelentingly grim from top to bottom.

Overall: if you’re after a jet-black story, don’t know or remember much of the original version and are a fan of Nesbø’s writing, I’d give this a go. Otherwise, read the original!

Macbeth has been one of Shakespeare's plays that I have come back to time and time again. I have studied it many times and performed in it. So I was very excited for this title in the Hogarth Shakespeare series - especially given how amazing all of the other titles have been!

Jo Nesbo was a great choice to retell the story of Macbeth as he brings his own dark gritty crime writing and melds it with Shakespeare's original story to create a gripping new take on a well known tale.

The grim, depressing northern industrial town is a great setting for this story as it fits in perfectly with the general aesthetic of the original.

I think there is a lot to enjoy in this book even if you are not a fan of Shakespeare as at the heart of it, this book is a thrilling crime novel.

This is not just a jo nesbo book it is a jo nesbo and others book.
Not typical story, it is a rewrite of macbeth in a modern version. Recogniable as Shakespeare. Not what i expected.
Jo nesbo should stick yo what he does best.

I'm a huge Jo Nesbo fan, and so far have never been disappointed. However there is always a first time and this is the one. Very hard to follow and I'm not sure why I persevered to finish it. Sorry, not for me.
Thanks to NetGally and the publisher for the ARC. Bring back Harry Hole!

I am already a fan of Jo Nesbo novels so was probably always going to get round to reading his contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare project where current writers are invited to update Shakespeare’s plays, setting them in modern times with modern characters. If I am completely honest it did take me a while to get fully submerged in this one. The story is set in the 1970's with the Police force trying to eradicate it's serious drug problem. Macbeth is the head of the SWAT team and he has addiction issues of his own and faces a drug lord named Hecate, who has connections and sees himself manipulating Macbeth.
This is an interesting experiment and although you don't need to be well educated in the original Shakespeare version I found it added to the intrigue and interest.
A book that gets better the more you read.
I would like to thank Net Galley and Random House for supplying a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

With the pricking of my thumb,
something wicked this way comes

When I marked this book as 'to read' I knew exactly what I was letting myself in for. I had studied Macbeth back when I was nineteen so I knew. And as the dead kept piling up, I did ask myself why I was doing this to myself. But Nesbo's dab hand kept me hooked in, kept my reluctant fingers pushing my kindle screen to turn the page.

I think he handled the transition from Shakespeare's Macbeth to his Macbeth very well. His ability to create people, fragile, strong, cruel, loving people, all rolled into one, serves him well here. I became invested in them, even though I knew the outcome, the tragedy of it all.

Macbeth is a study in ambition, greed, power, fragility, strength, weakness. How life presents opportunities and then we choose and then live with that choice. Even the most insignificant of choices count because we pay for all of them. How we coat these choices in nice and righteous titles 'for the good of the community', 'because it is a right and just thing to do', 'it is the right thing for my family', etc etc and how beneath, other reasons push and pull at us.

Then mix all this together with all the other choices other people make and we have a great big churning mass of humanity where the death of one is not equal to the death of another. Where one death is more important than the death of another even though both are murders. Because they do not have the same payoff when used for the gain of one particular group or another.

Ah life is but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nesbo's book is so cleverly told, re-creating the classic Macbeth. Set in a corrupt, lawless town, Macbeth is an Inspector in the police force.

The setting allows all the characters to be woven in to the story, both as supposedly honest policemen and the more obvious criminals in the drug dealers of Sweno and Hecate.

Although both of them flawed, I sympathised with Duff, an arrogant, unfaithful man, albeit honest. And Lady, Macbeth's wife, whilst whispering in his ear that the power should be his, I could feel some empathy with her when we understood why she was climbing so high and how low she had been.

It was sometimes a struggle to keep track of the numerous characters, but the action flowed, the insidiousness of Macbeth's threats were chilling and the setting was clever. A clever tale.

This series by Hogarth is an interesting concept. Nesbo takes the characters, themes and styles of "the Scottish Play" and transplants them into the Scottish Police Force, playing with the ideas of a drug names "Brew" made in a kitchen by three sisters and the machinations of the power struggles within the police hierarchy and local Mayoral office. It is a satisfying read although a little long in my view, there are sections that feel as though a tighter edit would have helped keep the momentum and drive. But Nesbo brings his usual intensity and character driven narrative and this gives a pleasing quality.read.

I wasn't able to finish this book. I've read Jo Nesbo in the past, and enjoyed his detective crime series, but this book felt too contrived and forced. Because he was trying to follow Shakespeare's Macbeth story, it didn't flow very well, he was having to keep to a storyline which then made it feel too rigid. Not for me.

Jo Nesbo, with his Scandi-Noir credentials, reinterprets Shakespeare's Macbeth within the provinces of a police force in the 1970s in a bleak declining town riven with gang warfare, drug addiction, corruption and all other manner of darkest deeds and where little differentiates the cops from the criminals. This novel mostly follows the trajectory of the original play, albeit in a suitably blood drenched and twisted fashion. Nesbo gives us a tale of ruthless political ambition, betrayal, treachery and murder, with a mesmerising and compelling antihero in the ex-drug addict, Macbeth, as the head of the heavily armoured SWAT team with a troubled past from which he was rescued by Banquo. The Police Commissioner is none other than Duncan, with Malcolm as his deputy and Duff heads the Narcotics unit. Recently promoted after a policing debacle, Macbeth has a skill and penchant for daggers despite the armoury of weapons at his disposal. There is an intense, heavily atmospheric, menacing setting of a rain sodden anarchic town, infested with a dense, poisonous, and ominous mist providing the perfect background to the rivers of blood that are unleashed in Macbeth's path to power.

The manipulative Hecate is a drug lord serving up the addictive and lethal crack like 'brew' that so many need and cannot exist without. His 'witches' seduce the insecure power hungry Macbeth with the prophetic promise of the highest office of Police Commissioner, providing he leaves the drug business alone. Macbeth is egged on by the casino owner and his love, Lady, but needs to partake of the 'brew' to access the murkier qualities of his younger self to find the courage required to stab Duncan in his sleep, whilst laying the blame elsewhere. Macbeth succeeds beyond his wildest dreams, but all is not well. The delusional Macbeth's life begins to unravel at a startling rate with the rising tide of the dead as he descends into a drug fuelled psychotic haze of paranoia and hallucinations where everyone is suspect and a threat that has to be eradicated. If you are familiar with the play, then you will be aware of where all this is heading, although not quite perhaps in the way you might expect.

Nesbo succeeds in providing us with a thrilling version of a contemporary reworking of Macbeth, which is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, having first studied it at school. However, if you are in search of a tale that is anchored in reality, then you are doomed to be sorely disappointed. To get the most out of this retelling, you will need to suspend your disbelief on a number of occasions. I have seen many versions of Macbeth in a variety of settings through the years, Nesbo's Macbeth stacks up well with the best of them. It had me reading as fast as I could, desperate to find out how it all ends. Highly entertaining and providing you are not a purist, highly recommended. Many thanks to Random House Vintage for an ARC.