2 weeks Ago By Reviewed by Nick Martin
Nobody messes with the Opgard brothers, Carl and Roy, in northern Norway — no one alive, at least. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * Nobody messes with the Opgard brothers, Carl and Roy, in northern Norway — no one alive, at least. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? Nobody messes with the Opgard brothers, Carl and Roy, in northern Norway — no one alive, at least.
Immoral, amoral, psychopaths, sociopaths, gangsters, nasty good old boys, the Dukes of Hazzard with unspeakably despicable attitudes, Mr. Ripley with poor grammar and a limited vocabulary — your book club likely includes professionals who can pin down a diagnosis. We first met Carl and Roy back in 2020 in The Kingdom, a departure from the norm by Norwegian superstar murder mystery author Jo Nesbo.
Stian Broch photo Jo Nesbo’s latest is the second book to feature the wicked Opgard brothers Carl and Roy. On their run-down rural farm, the boys were trying to scrape together the cash to build a grand hotel far from population centres or ski country. Along the way, we learned of numerous fatalities including the hmm-that-sounds-odd death of their parents, of Carl’s wife (pregnant by Roy), of a suspicious sheriff whose body was never found, of a foreign hitperson.
.. the list goes on.
Did we mention their father regularly raped Carl, or that Roy is a skilled mechanic who knew just how brakes could fail at the most inopportune of times? That there was an inordinate number of deadly crashes on a bad piece of road that screamed for guardrails, bodies recovered but wrecked vehicles left to fester? Anyway, you’re here to read , not . It’s eight years later, the hotel is built, Carl is building a palatial home for himself, and that vanished sheriff’s son is now the sheriff and convinced the Opgards killed his father. He’s relentless.
And there’ve been tremendous advances made in tracing DNA. Carl (the younger, better-looking, charismatic charmer) is still working his way through the boudoirs of their little town of Os, while our first-person narrator Roy is still the dyslexic big brother whose fists protect Carl from cuckolded husbands and controlling boyfriends. Roy has dreams of building an amusement park out here in the sticks (or, more accurately, rocks), with an enormous roller coaster.
But the highway going through their town is about to be cut off by grandiose plans to tunnel through a mountain for a new highway that will leave Os isolated and destitute. Could anything persuade the engineers studying the tunnel to advise against it and instead expand the highway through Os? Like you’re going to find that out here. So many people in Os had shared each other’s beds in younger days, going on to marry people who may not have been the best choice for eternal happiness.
So many married people are now sleeping with other married people to whom they tend not to be married. Everyone has secrets. Some have Secrets.
Blood Ties As the plot twists unfold, the sheriff finally persuades the authorities to haul up the wrecks that plummeted down that piece of bad road and unleash the forensics teams to search for trace DNA. Cue the ominous music. Nesbo is best known for his series of violent, gory and somewhat sadistic books about Oslo police detective Harry Hole, the world’s most depressed man.
Hole specializes in tracking down -calibre serial killers who delight in gross-out ways to torture and murder their victims, most often women. A lot of people read those books. The violence in is certainly muted by Nesbo standards.
Nothing here suggests that Nesbo sees Roy Opgard as an anti-hero whom we are to admire — he is an evil killer who gets himself into hopeless situations and somehow gets out of them, mostly. Well, some of the time, beating the odds, but unlikely to do so forever..
. won’t make you feel any better about the human condition. But it’s a darned good read.
Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin has Scandinavia on his travel bucket list, but, fortunately, he’s terrified of roller coasters and will be giving Os a pass. Blood Ties: A Novel By Jo Nesbo, translated by Robert Ferguson Random House of Canada, 384 pages, $38 Advertisement Advertisement.
