In 2015, armed with the stamp of approval from the estate of Stieg Larsson, the late author of the Millennium trilogy, a fourth book was released to continue the series. The Larsson family chose journalist and writer David Lagercrantz for The Girl in the Spider’s Web, spinning a new story around Larsson’s quirky creation, Lisbeth Salander, genius hacker with a troubled past who seeks justice, often by violent means, for herself and others.
Two years on, a fifth book is here, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye, which is already on the New York Times bestseller list.
Lagercrantz, who has famously ghost-written controversial Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović’s autobiography, is not as violent as Larsson in portraying Salander and the world around her.
The first three books, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, have blood splattered all over them. The trilogy was published after Larsson’s death, and there is an overwhelming feeling that some plotlines and details are loose, missing the writer’s final glanceover.
This edition opens with Salander at Flodberga prison, doing time for “unlawful use of property and reckless endangerment in the dramatic events following the murder of Professor Frans Balder,” in Spider’s Web.
Salander had hidden and saved Balder’s brilliant eight-year-old autistic boy, refusing to cooperate with the police because she believed that the investigation had been betrayed. Here, she is still trying to unravel her violent, traumatic past, to explain her self to herself.
When Salander gets a chance to find out, she seeks the help of the other great Larsson creation, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, editor of the investigative magazine Millennium.
Obstacles come her way, not least the fundamentalists from Bangladesh she enrages for rescuing one of their own from brutality or the scary prison gang leader Benito or her long-lost twin sister Camilla or the people who want to keep the past hidden, especially a pseudoscientific experiment with troubled gifted children called The Registry.
In Spider’s Web, David Lagercrantz managed to knit it together tightly with both characters and city — Stockholm — getting deep back stories.
He starts in the same vein in the new book, but there are too many storylines and too much scientific shtick on genetics and quantum theory playing spoilsport in Salander’s narrative.