NORSTEDTs ageNcy

crime Fiction
Fossildrottningen
The Escape from Paradise
by Michael Mortimer (pseudonym)
Spring 2014, 509 pages
Senior Editor: Susanna Romanus, Peter Karlsson
Rights sold to:
Bruna, Netherlands • Destino, Spain
Btb, Germany • Modtryk, Denmark
KRP Yayincilik,Turkey (option)
The Escape from Paradise
In November 1932, Nadezhda Alliluyeva takes
her own life, broken by the unhappy marriage
with Joseph Stalin. In a fit of grief and rage Stalin
takes her gun and farewell letter, along with
a stone he got her as a present, and orders them
to be kept secret until the end of times.
Ida, Alma and Lasse take to Moscow to search
for old Soviet files at a governmental archive
inside the Kremlin, and there they find the
so called “Stalin Stone” – a stone that fit together
with the Maidenstone.
After leaving Moscow, Alma, Lasse and Ida
cross the border to Ukraine and enter the
forbidden zone surrounding Pripyat, by the
Chernobyl nuclear plant. This is where Ida’s
mother Eva has been living since disappearing
when Ida was a small child; a place she
calls “Paradise”, surrounded by the richest
fauna in all of Europe – where predators and
other animals have flourished in the absence
of man.
But Eva’s house is deserted, and instead they
are caught by a network of scientists who are
also after the stones. But the trio manages
to escape and take a third stone with them
from the network.
Now only the fourth piece remains; a stone
that once belonged to Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, the German poet and mineralogist,
and clues to its whereabouts are found in a
curious text about a place where “the wrath
of God never subsides”. The hunt continues
to Rome and to Vatican City. Will our heroes
manage to get hold of the last stone – and
piece the four together in order to create the
Queen Fossil?
The scientific adventure continues.
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