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.