Queenland

A car has crashed into a mountainside. A 42-year-old woman is sitting behind the wheel—dead.

As news of the fatal accident spreads through the village, police investigator Vigdis Malmstrøm starts to suspect that something isn’t right. The damage to the car should have been much worse. There are no skid marks on the road. And the woman’s purse is lying in the back seat, as if there had been another passenger in the car.

Meanwhile, unease is growing at the farm owned by brothers Jonny and Jarle Svartskog. What will happen to the cars they’re buying and selling when the police come knocking? Who is Unn Hansen, the woman living on the farm and keeping bees in the forest—and whose background remains a mystery? And what really happened that summer day two years ago, when a nineteen-year-old girl vanished from the village without a trace?

As Vigdis does her best to untangle the increasingly complex web, spring gives way to the oppressive heat of summer. And in the forest, the bees are buzzing—on a mission for their queen. Without her, they don’t have a chance.

With Queenland, Eva Fretheim has written a crime novel unlike any other. In elegant, tightly woven prose, she tells a story of jealousy, revenge, desire, and lies—and of the inevitable changing of queens.