2025
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.
A new name has emerged on the crime fiction horizon: Eva Fretheim—the woman behind a refreshingly different take on rural noir. (…) Fretheim has reinvented the crime genre with a novel that lets nature take center stage—almost as a character in its own right.
We dare say that with this crime debut, the author has reinvented the genre in many ways. Her descriptions of nature are beautiful and almost magical in their form—providing a striking contrast to the many dark and grim scenes found elsewhere in the book.
A refreshingly simple story, more like a chamber play, from a small village that deals with the murder of two women in a short space of time.
Eva Fretheim
Julia Granberg / BLUNDERBUSS
