I was thrown when I first started reading, trying to work out what was going on as I was expecting a faithful recreation of the play. I was pleased to find that this was not the case. Once I got into the novel and ignored my expectations of a Shakespeare rewrite I could not put this down.

A very modern rewrite of the play that works spectacularly. Jo Nesbo has focused much more on the opening to explore how reputation and honour is awarded to Macbeth and his best friend Banquo. They are part of SWAT, Duncan is the Mayor and Duff is turned into a rival senior police officer. As in the play events conspire to drive the plot towards key events e.g. the death of Cawdor.

This is a novel for adults, not learners as it will not help study the play. Some characters need context e.g. Hecate 'was the goddess of magic, witchcraft, the night' (google search),  and so considered evil but is not a character we met in the play. Here Hecate is a manipulative crime boss.

This is a novel for males as the main characters are men. There are stylistic women who are part of this world but not significant enough to be more than sketched out.

This is one novel that will be recommended to the men in my life. I can see it easily being transferred to the TV as crime dramas are very current.

Jo Nesbo has provided another must read for his followers.

I was given the novel free by netgalley.com for my fair and honest review.

In a town riven by pollution, drug abuse and crime a corrupt leadership does little to make changes. However after a successful raid against a gang, the leader of the SWAT team, Macbeth, is promoted rapidly. As his enemies and rivals fall by the wayside Macbeth becomes drunk on power and the support of the woman he loves, Lady. But forces are plotting his downfall.
This novel is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Project in which learning writers are asked to reinterpret famous Shakespearean themes. Nesbo has chosen to write Scandi-crime version of Macbeth in which the characters have the same names and motives, just the setting is different. As scandal-crime novel it is OK, I hated the dystopian setting, as a 'version' of Macbeth it works well. Unfortunately as a whole I didn't feel it hung together with Nesbo's trademark tension.

Macbeth by Jo Nesbø is a dark tome of page turning pervasive evil where the guttering candle of hope is either fanned or near extinguished by the draught of the turning leaf. “The only thing necessary for the trumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” could not be a more fitting quotation for many of the characters in the book. However, even those who choose to acquiesce can be changed when the table turns on them. So, there is towards the end some hope for good to triumph over evil.

My only gripe with the translation is that there is an unusual meld of Scandinavian names and car types set against a backdrop of Scottish industrial decay and drug addiction.

Macbeth is the Third Hogarth Shakespeare novel I have read. Having previously enjoyed New Boy by Tracy Chevalier and Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood. This is however, my FIRST novel by Jo Nesbo despite owning the 11 Harry Hole novels. It is a series I am reluctant to start because I know I will want to devour each title one after the other. I will also be investing in the four other standalone novels by the author.

Macbeth is a gritty and harsh look into police corruption and organised crime. I felt the author had done an incredible job of adapting the original into a modern-day setting. With Macbeth the reluctant dirty cop and the city with its prostitute ‘witches’.

‘Everyone has a price’

The novel shows how the narcotics unit, SWAT team and gang unit work independently of one another but are eventually brought together after police corruption and malpractice is exposed. The new unit (OCU) organised crime unit with unite all three departments under the supervision of one senior office.
But who will be the officer in charge and wield the power over the city?
‘For Eternal loyalty is inhuman and betrayal is human’

Macbeth’s love a casino boss named ‘Lady’ plays the role of Lady Macbeth to the letter. She is cunning and desperate for the two to hold power over the entire city.
‘You have to kill Duncan’ – Lady

Betrayal and power go hand in hand in this character driven novel. I was intrigued by so many minor characters/themes. Such as, the one-eyed drug addict and the ‘Brew’ the new drug doing the rounds on Scotland’s streets.

A great edition to the Hogarth Shakespeare series.
One I am sure my GCSE teen would love to study much more than the original. 4*

This one was a little slow to start for me, the writing wasn't necessarily my kind of style but overall an action packed read and new take on the story of Macbeth. An irresistible tale.

Jo Nesbø is the latest author to participate in the Hogarth Shakespeare project. Launched in October 2015, the project’s stated aim is ‘to see Shakespeare’s plays reimagined by some of today’s bestselling and most celebrated writers. The books are true to the spirit of the original plays, while giving authors an exciting opportunity to do something new.’

This is the first book by Jo Nesbø I’ve read, although I’m aware of his books and his many fans across the world. Therefore, I came to the book with high expectations both because of his reputation and the Shakespeare play he had chosen to tackle, Macbeth. Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed. At over 600 pages, I found the book rather a slog and not as gripping as I had expected. For me, the author didn’t really succeed in ‘doing something new’ to the extent I was hoping for.

The book certainly fleshes out the back stories of many of the characters in Shakespeare’s play but I didn’t find this added much for me. A lot of time was devoted to the detailed planning of police operations, carried out with ruthlessness and little regard for the rule of law. So if you like plenty of blood and guts, you’ll be happy. Things picked up a little when Lady (the character represents who Lady Macbeth) arrived on the scene but not enough to reignite my interest in the book as a whole.

The book is set in a rundown Scottish town in the 1970s but has a distinctly dystopian feel. It’s a place where unemployment and deprivation has led to a high level of addiction to drugs, gambling and alcohol. In practice, the drug barons are in charge and corruption in local institutions, including the Police is rife. To my mind this was where the book worked best; conjuring up an atmosphere of decay and hopelessness, a society divided into ‘haves’ and ‘haves nots’ and torn apart by violence and gang warfare.

I think if the writing had been tauter, some of the detail had been excised and the author could have done more than just retell the story but set in another time and place, this would have made Macbeth a more compelling read. Like some other reviewers, I don’t believe this is the most successful contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series.

I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, Vintage, and NetGalley.

I am not the ideal audience for this book, as I don't read such hard hitting slow burners showing the dark side of crime. I tried picking up the book again, after DNFing it.
This book was really difficult to get into. The characters fell flat, cops who killed without a reason were not amongst my favorite. This was a world of crime, where drug trade was the contemporary side of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Not a fan of this theme. The pace was blaringly slow. I had to skim read many parts. The timelines were difficult to follow as it went back and forth. I kept getting confused. I don't like books that.
This was my first book by Jo Nesbo, and I think I should have started with his other series. Dark descriptions, boring characters, and long winded descriptions, along with lots of killing made this not a good read.

Not one of my favorite Jo Nesbo novels, but you can't go wrong with Nesbo even when he doesn't quite hit the mark. I think the parameters of this "experiment"--tackling Shakespeare from a modern perspective--stole some of Nesbo's particularly unique takes on crime fiction. It was jarring as well to see him writing away from Harry Hole, an absolute icon of the genre. Worth a look, but not at the top of Nesbo oeuvre.

With the Hogarth Shakespeare Project calling on the talents of some of the acclaimed novelists of today, to retell a selection of Shakespeare’s finest plays, who better to reimagine Macbeth with all its inherent darkness than bestselling crime author Jo Nesbo. Talking of his inspiration for his own Macbeth, Nesbo says that the original is “a thriller about the struggle for power, set both in a gloomy, stormy, noir like setting, and in a dark, paranoid human mind”, so not that far removed from the familiar crime writing tropes we all recognise, So how does Nesbo’s take on this Shakespeare classic measure up?

Having pretty much forgotten the plot of Macbeth since reading it years ago, it was quite enjoyable not overthinking the comparisons and similarities between the play and Nesbo’s rendition, so however scant your knowledge of the original, the key characters and pivotal scenes are well in evidence here. The book is suffused with direct and reworked familiar quotes from the play, and at times there’s a cheery playfulness to how Nesbo attributes them to certain characters, tempered by the darkest proclamations that arise from the darkest deeds in the book. Sometimes the language feels a little over reliant on quotes, even a touch forced. It seems that Nesbo gets too caught up in the need to echo the original, and the dialogue that comes from some characters seems a little disingenuous to our perception of them, and makes the dialogue rigid at times.

However, like Shakespeare’s version, and as Nesbo alluded to himself, the key theme is power, and the desperate, violent and dehumanising actions that one man, the eponymous police officer Macbeth, takes to gain and consolidate power. As one character says of Macbeth’s lust for power, “He’s already managed to divest himself of any emotions that tie him to morality and humanity, now power is his new and only lover” and this is what Nesbo captures so perfectly in his characterisation. Macbeth, aided and abetted by his conniving lover Lady, is an intense and mesmerising character throughout, battling his physical addiction to ‘brew’, scheming and plotting, driven by his suffocating love for Lady and his own thirst for complete autocracy. I loved the sense of this claustrophobic vacuum that they exist in, completely immersed in each other, and both hungry for power, until the seismic shift in their relationship. Likewise, I thought that Duff was an incredibly interesting character, at one time the absolute confidante of Macbeth, but now as obsessed with justice as Macbeth is with power, whatever the cost to them both. There is a large cast of characters, and Nesbo balances them very well in what is more of a reading marathon than a sprint, keeping the reader on the back foot with the double dealing, betrayal, and sudden outbursts of extreme violence, as faithful to Shakespeare himself, he decreases them by the page by nefarious means.

Undoubtedly, my favourite aspect of the book was the setting, in a reimagined Scottish city replete with poisonous air, seedy backstreets, the purveyors of human misery in drugs or gambling, a crumbling economy, but all resonating with the echo of history. Nesbo is incredibly good at grounding the reader in the specific location against which his characters vent and rage. plot and scheme and love and die, and there’s an incredibly visual quality to the book as a whole which is vital to alleviate the intensity of the raw emotions much in evidence here. This, and the very well defined characterisation was definitely central to my overall enjoyment of the book, which, although a little drawn out at times, slowed down by the necessity to reference the original a little too tenaciously, was a satisfying read overall. It mostly captured the dark and dangerous ambition and melancholy of Shakespeare’s original, and I’m sure this proved a very interesting writing experience for Nesbo himself

Having read a few of the Harry Hole books before and quite liking them, I was curious to see how Nesbo would approach a modern retelling of Macbeth. The answer is not very well, but he is not alone in that regard, I don't think Macbeth generally tends to lend itself well to modern retelling.

The setting is a very paint-by-numbers urban environment with a few Scottish place names taken from Wikipedia thrown in for good measure. The story itself is more or less pulled directly from the original play and hammered into a this modern day police mold and it didn't fit or work for me.

Would probably only recommend to ardent Nesbo fans.

With thanks to Netgalley and Vintage for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

Remembering the story from reading the play at school, it was fascinating to see the interpretation into a more modern setting by this author. The dark atmosphere was captured as well as the darkness of the characters. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and definitely recommend it. I look forward to reading the other interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays.

Interesting retake on the original play but no real additional story. Think I rather miss Harry Hole and would prefer his innovation than this old yarn. Still reasonably entertaining.

This is deliciously dark, and highly addictive. I have not read any of Jo Nesbo's books before, definitely one to search out in the future. Highly recommended.

I was already convinced of the success of the Hogarth Shakespeare re-telling series after reading "Othello" transformed into "New Boy" by Tracy Chevalier. And now with this "Macbeth", that opinion only solidified.

Nesbø's "Macbeth" works so well because he is not afraid of the original Shakespeare text. It is absolutely brilliant and still reminiscent of Shakespeare because he translates the source material into a different genre and era without transforming it much. He gives the characters a chance to get fleshed out beyond the five-acts of an Elizabethan play, gives them more (gruesome) backstories, emotions and generally depth. Which works well both for understanding their decisions and for feeling with them as they inevitably die. Because this is a very deadly novel in which a lot of blood is shed (just like in the play, no need to complain about unnecessary violence, though it is certainly not a book for the faint of heart). Maybe it is one of the advantages of the modern retelling that only in this familiar context do you realize just how bloody the play was - only you never thought of it, because that was medieval times, right?

Aside from all the blood and violence, there is also great exploration of characters and human nature. In this version, the question of fate vs. human fault is clearly answered in favor of the humans, as their are no supernatural elements in the book and the Macbeths' bring their own downfall upon themselves. And last but not least: because this is so well written, with very colorful descriptions, amazing action, twists and turns, and great dialogue, this will also be an enjoyable novel for anyone who has never heard of Shakespeare. In short: One of my favorite books of the year!

This book is very different! It is a retelling of the Shakespeare play and is the same in that it is a tale of power and corruption. However this story is set in the 1970's in a dystopian society but because a lot of the same or similar names were used I found it hard not to imagine the characters in Shakespearean times. I think it was a clever concept and an intriguing story but I am not sure it actually works very well.

I have been enjoying reading the Hogarth rewrites, mostly by favourite authors of mine. Having not read any Jo Nesbo books before I did not come to this with any preconceptions of how the 'Scottish Play' would be treated. I was gripped by Nesbo's imagined 1950s (60s?) Scotland, a post 2nd world war setting where unemployment, mental health issues and drugs are spiralling and fed on by crime. Macbeth is a heroic police officer from the other side of the tracks to the majority of privately educated police officers and is being groomed by hidden forces to take over and be under the control of Hecate now that the corrupt Kenneth is gone. The Shakespearean characters are all there, upated to the nastier side of mid 20th century Scotland but power and politics are still the main themes. Nesbo's writing of Lady as an ex-prostitute, now casino owner, was particularly effective and the telling of her back story through the narrative was superb. Power is treated both literally and metaphorically as the root of the evil being a particularly strong and addictive drug which is brewed in Hecate's kitchen by the weird sisters. Nesbo creates the characters and settings so well that I could see and smell this kitchen, the casino, the station, the bikers' clubhouse and the external locations. I would really like to see this version of Macbeth made for television and have been enjoying considering who I would like cast in the main parts My thanks to the publisher via Net Galley for a complimentary ARC of this great book in return for an honest review.

This was a really good idea - take one of the original noir stories, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and add a modern master of crime-writing, Jo Nesbo - but, while there are many things to like and admire about the book, it is a little less than the sum of its parts. The parts I enjoyed most are essentially all Nesbo - exciting and visceral car chases, a showdown with drug-dealing gangs, the action scenes, elements that he has inserted into the gaps in the source material where much of the ‘action’, such as Duncan’s murder, famously happens off-stage. Nesbo updates the play to an unnamed, largely Scottish, city in the 1970s - think Glasgow pre-City of Culture - and it gives the story a suitably dark and violent background. Unfortunately, I found the dialogue stilted and a little too much of a homage to the original Shakespeare. The best productions of the play bring the language to life and make it exciting and perhaps that is the biggest problem - the play is meant to be performed rather than read. Perhaps this would work as a dark, Scandinavian series along the lines of The Bridge or The Killing, and I would certainly watch it. Macbeth is not a terrible novel by any means, a worthwhile exercise, but it doesn’t match Nesbo’s best. Nor Shakespeare’s.

This book really doesn't need any introduction, hype or explanation. It's Jo Nesbo's own modern take on the story of Macbeth.

It is glorious. A masterpiece. And I don't feel like I'm exaggerating at all.

Nesbo has absolutely captured the essence of the original. It is still full of murder, paranoia and insanity. The book is set in a dystopian city where everyone is crooked and the drug pushers rule all. Macbeth is the head of the SWAT team, and Lady Macbeth (or here, just Lady) is the very shrewd owner of a casino. And there are other characters you will recognise if you are familiar with Shakespeare's classic, although not in their original forms. As in the original however, the story is all about obsession with power.

Without spoiling anything, things get pretty crazy pretty fast. The writing is pacey yet insidious; dark yet poignant. The prose is contemporary but strangely poetic.

I absolutely loved this book. It has become an immediate favourite. It doesn't need to be compared to the original, I think it both stands on its own; or equally, side by side Shakespeare's much loved version. Does it rival the original? That's not for me to decide, but for me it's an instant classic. 5 stars.

‘Human ambition will always stretch towards sun like a thistle and overshadow and kill everything around it.’

Jo Nesbo brings his typically dark Scandinavian vision to Shakespeare’s classic tale, part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series. It is a violent world, set in a 1970s metropolis in a vaguely defined geographical setting. It rains – a lot. This is a novel looking at the moral choices we make, at ambition and power and how it seduces and takes over like a drug. Nesbo stays true to the general outline of the original play but creates a world where drug addiction and gambling are rife, and violence is never far from the surface.

It is undoubtedly well written, but I could never fully engage with the characters and I admit to skim-reading several pages just to get the gist of the story. It is an interesting take on the Bard, and whilst the themes of corruption and politics are apposite in these troubling times, for me this was only a decent read, not a great one. The original play makes the points well enough, and Nesbo doesn’t quite manage to create enough ‘newness’ to his adaptation to make it stand out or to say anything original. Nonetheless, I quite enjoyed it and it certainly displays Nesbo’s prodigious talent as a writer. His large fan-following will enjoy this novel.

(With thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for an ARC of the novel in return for an unbiased and honest review.)

Macbeth is the second book that I have read in the Hogarth Shakespeare retelling's. The first that I read was New Boy by Tracy Chevalier and it left me shocked and open mouthed. Sadly this addition left me underwhelmed.

While it was incredibly well written it was not an easy or pleasant read for me. It was action packed but slow going - I still am not sure how he managed to accomplish that. Maybe it was that it just didn't manage to hold my interest, it was lacking in likeable characters and for me I need to at least be rooting for one character. Due to this and the fact that I just did not connect with the book or form any feelings to Macbeth, it made me feel like I was wading through molasses.

I am fully aware that what I disliked about this book is what others will love about it but I struggled to finish Macbeth and when I got to the end it was with a sense of relief.

I have said before that I have never read Shakespeare's works and they do not call to me. These retelling's have called to me and I was so moved and distressed by New Boy, that expected a level from Macbeth that Jo Nesbo's account did not deliver for me.  I found it strange and just did not connect with it at all.

So in conclusion the writing quality was the standard that one would expect from such an experienced author, but I did not enjoy this particular Hogarth Shakespeare.