El reino / The Kingdom

The Kingdom (Kongeriket) is a standalone thriller by Jo Nesbø, first published in Norway in 2020 and translated into English by Robert Ferguson in 2021. Narrated by Roy Opgard, a dyslexic mechanic who has never left the remote mountain town of Os, it departs from Nesbø's Harry Hole detective series to tell a slow-building family drama with a criminal undertow.

Roy's quiet life is upended when his younger brother Carl returns home after years away, bringing a new wife, Shannon, and an ambitious plan to build a resort that could rescue the struggling town's economy. As Carl's scheme gathers momentum, the local sheriff begins reopening questions about unexplained deaths in the brothers' past — including their parents' fatal car accident on a notorious mountain bend — and old buried secrets start to surface.

Critics have described it as an atmospheric, morally complex Nordic noir that takes its time establishing its characters before building toward an intense conclusion, anchored by Nesbø's use of misdirection and a narrator whose loyalty to family outweighs his sense of right and wrong.