An intriguing premise: On his way to conquer England by way of York in 1066, King Harald Hardrada of Norway secretly buried a great treasure in a ruined Saxon church. Some time later, the church was rebuilt without the treasure being discovered. Only now, in the post-Christian present when the church is falling down again, a priest accidentally finds the secret vault where the treasure lies. Once he informs the authorities, his church becomes the target, first of ordinary thieves, and then of right-wing, racist political extremists. So a Norwegian agent is assigned to infiltrate the conspiracy and sabotage it.

Hardrada’s Hoard could have been a pretty entertaining book. And I enjoyed it enough to finish it. But overall I found it unsatisfactory, for a couple reasons.

First of all, the numerous historical misrepresentations. The authors clearly did some research in preparing this book – their image of the Vikings is better, for instance, than that of the History Channel series – but they make a lot of pretty serious mistakes. They think Vikings used two-handed swords. They tell us with straight faces that King Harald’s queen and two daughters died in battle with him at Stamford Bridge (in fact the queen, a delicate Russian princess, stayed home in Norway with the girls). They tell us there was a spell of cold climate in Scandinavia during the Viking Age (the precise opposite of the truth). They seem to think Harald and his men were heathen (they were Christian). They think the 1950s Kirk Douglas movie popularized the idea of winged helmets for Vikings (the image goes back much further, and there are no winged helmets in that movie). They think Vikings sported Norman hair styles.

My second problem is that the sex scenes are far more explicit than called for.

And last but not least, the final resolution is both improbable and unsatisfactory.

Didn’t work for me.