Review by New York Times Review
THERE ARE MANY ways to continue a series after its author's death. One is to wait a long time, until the original material has achieved classic status, and then find an established heavyweight willing to step up, like a great actor taking on his third King Lear. Examples would be John Banville reviving Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, or Jill Paton Walsh giving us more of Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey. As readers we approach such attempts cautiously, with style points and degrees of difficulty in mind, as if we were judges at an Olympic diving competition, and therefore, however good the execution may be, these books will always remain to some extent interesting curiosities. Another way is to continue as soon as possible, to give the newly bereft reader the sheer joy of another story with much loved characters and familiar scenarios. There are many such examples, but the all-time champ could be Robert Ludlum, who seems to have published nearly two dozen books in his lifetime, and considerably more than that after its untimely conclusion. Some endeavors have a foot in both camps. Sophie Hannah's Hercule Poirot is both a technical challenge and catnip to those craving more from Agatha Christie's enigmatic Belgian. And now joining her is David Lagercrantz, with "The Girl in the Spider's Web," which continues Stieg Larsson's Millennium series. That sequence was only three books long ("The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," "The Girl Who Played With Fire" and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest") and, unusually, Larsson was dead even before the first installment came out. That sad and poignant fact launched the series from the features pages, rather than the book pages alone, which helped from a coldblooded promotional point of view. But there's no doubt that its spectacular success was driven by its two central characters, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the - what, exactly? - Lisbeth Salander. Certainly, when the continuation was announced, there was joy on fan sites at the prospect of more from both of them - and in particular more from Salander, irresistibly tough, punkish, leather-clad, pierced and inked (including the dragon on her back) and at times unhinged. Thus Lagercrantz's first responsibility was to give us more of those two, which promised to be easy enough in Blomkvist's case. Blomkvist is a journalist writing for Millennium, a Stockholm magazine dedicated to investigative reporting. In real life, Larsson was a journalist and so is Lagercrantz (as well as being a fine novelist in his own right), so we can expect him to know the terrain - although Larsson's surviving long-term partner, Eva Gabrielsson, shut out of ownership or control by Sweden's surprisingly behind-the-times attitude to inheritance by common-law spouses, feels that Lagercrantz lacks Larsson's, and hence Blomkvist's, passion and radical instincts. Which hints at Lagercrantz's technical challenge. To what extent are fictional characters genuinely reproducible? To what extent are they animated by the singular psyche of the original author? To what extent can that author's sparking synapses be detected through his language and served up again by another through his own? Those challenges are only heightened by a character like Salander. She sprang off the page fully formed and vivid from her first appearance, as if shouldering aside the words to hover in the air between the reader and the book. It's no exaggeration to say that as an invention she's in the same ballpark as Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter. She's a classic antihero - fundamentally deranged, objectively appalling, lawless, violent and deceitful, but fiercely loved by millions of readers because she has good reasons for the way she is and a heart of gold. Can she be brought back to life by a different author - or will she lie inert on the slab? I opened the book, considering style points but mostly hungry for, yes, more of Salander. Any Swedish crime writer's first task is to decide whether to dodge or embrace the titanic shadow cast by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, who 50 years ago began the 10-book Martin Beck series, which invented modern Scandinavian crime fiction and still stands as its finest achievement. Lagercrantz chooses to embrace that tradition, and thus the narrative feels calm, patient and familiar. An agnostic Jewish cop named Bublanski says sadly of his department, "Inevitably there were corrupt and depraved people in the force." Both the line and the character could have been written by Wahloo and Sjowall. Other minor characters are introduced with full biographies and backgrounds, which isn't a pacing error but rather a courteous, very Swedish, approach to storytelling. The plot itself starts with computer hacking - into the National Security Agency in Maryland, no less - and Lagercrantz distinguishes himself by making the computer stuff very human. The technology serves the characters, rather than being a character itself. There's a mute and autistic boy who needs protection and has vital clues locked in his head, which might or might not be revealed in a drawing. Lagercrantz distinguishes himself there too, with a fine and sympathetic portrayal. There's artificial intelligence and code breaking and bad guys as icy and brutal as you'd like, but none of it is "techno" - its Swedishness, even as rendered in George Goulding's English translation, keeps it very real and modest, a little romantic and a little inhibited. It's a fine plot, with perhaps just one missed opportunity: American thriller writers know that if the N.S.A. were hacked, the response would be ballistic, hence offering a nice contrast between D.C. hysteria and Stockholm stoicism. But Lagercrantz makes nothing of it. And what of Lisbeth Salander? Given that Lagercrantz knows she's what readers want, her long and suspenseful introduction is masterful. It's a striptease. She's mentioned in the prologue ("One Year Earlier"), and then she's not in the story at all, and then she is, maybe, purely by inference, and then we get a brief glimpse of her, and then another, and then some longer scenes. But it's not until Page 216 that she actually speaks to Blomkvist. "Lisbeth," he asks, answering her phone call, "is that you?" "Shut up and listen," she replies, and he does. And we're off to the races. Or are we? Does she spark to life and get up off the slab? Very, very nearly. After he reunites her with Blomkvist, Lagercrantz seems to lose his nerve. He relies too much on third-party description - we're told that Salander is intense and fierce, which is a poor substitute for seeing intensity and ferocity for ourselves. Certainly she's appropriately brave, headstrong, smart and willful. And certainly the book's stronger foot is firmly in the "sheer joy of a new story" camp. But the sublime madness of Larsson's original isn't quite there. Interestingly, Lagercrantz has a character pick up a copy of Stephen King's "Pet Sematary" as potential bedtime reading. The conceit of that book is the existence of a patch of earth where, once buried, a dead pet or person will come alive again - but, crucially, diminished to a degree that depends on the time between death and the start of the magic process. It's been eight years since the Swedish publication of "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest." Was that too long? Was the hat-tip to "Pet Sematary" a coded acknowledgment that the task was impossible? The novel features artificial intelligence and code breaking and suitably icy bad guys. LEE CHILD'S new Jack Reacher thriller, "Make Me," is being published this month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 6, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In our 2008 review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was published in the U.S. after Stieg Larsson's death, we lamented the fact that there would be only three books in which to watch the charismatic Lisbeth Salander take on the world. That, of course, turned out to be a mistaken assumption. Salander may work most of her magic in the deepest recesses of the Internet, but what she does there never fails to have international repercussions. So it is with the punky hacker's fourth appearance in print, in a novel published worldwide three days ago by the Swedish house Norstedts, which gained rights to Larsson's franchise after a headline-making legal battle between the author's heirs and his longtime girlfriend, Eva Gabrielsson. Sympathy for Gabrielsson, who was vehemently against the publication of another Salander novel, has shrouded this book in a controversy not unlike that swirling about Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, but now, thankfully, it's time to set all that aside, at least for the moment, and focus on the book itself.The Girl in the Spider's Web is a very fine thriller, true to the characters and the world Larsson created but also taking the ongoing story in some new and exciting directions. Wisely, Lagercrantz begins with a set of new characters, principally Swedish computer genius Frans Bader; his autistic savant son, August; and the bulldog head of security at the NSA, Ed Needham. After uncovering evidence that the NSA may be working with the Russian Mafia to steal Bader's groundbreaking work on quantum computing, the techno genius leaves his Silicon Valley position and returns to Sweden to care for his son. Meanwhile, our heroes from the Millennium Trilogy, Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist, have troubles of their own. Salander has hacked part way into the NSA's Intranet in search of information concerning the crime ring formerly led by her father and now in the hands of her twin sister, Camilla; and Blomkvist is struggling to protect his magazine from a takeover by a media giant eager to make the muckraking journal more commercial. So much for setup; where Lagercrantz shows his stuff here is in bringing these plot strains together into what is both a fascinating exploration of electronic surveillance and a gripping, highly suspenseful personal drama in which Salander and the autistic August are thrown together and find strength from one another, Salander seeing her young self in August and August realizing that there are other people whose heads are also full of very long numbers swirling in unexpected directions.Lagercrantz excels not only with the major characters but also with the supporting cast, giving us moving snapshots of the rabbi-quoting cop Bublanski; the ferocious, crew-cut Needham, who forms a surprising bond of respect with his nemesis Salander; and, of course, the chilling Camilla, who ably steps in to take her father's place as the Evil One. Hats off to Lagercrantz, then, for taking on a daunting challenge and rising above the controversy to do good work. In the end, though, this book, like Larsson's trilogy, is all about Salander. She is one of those characters like Hamlet, like Holden Caulfield who somehow jumps free of authorial restraint and goes where she wants to go. This book works because Lagercrantz has the great good sense to let Salander run free.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lagercrantz's worthy, crowd-pleasing fourth installment in the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium saga opens in Sweden, where some intellectual property developed by artificial intelligence genius Frans Balder has been stolen by a video game company with ties to Russian mobsters. Crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who's casting about for a new investigative project, is about to meet with Balder when an intruder kills the scientist and puts Balder's autistic eight-year-old son in danger. Meanwhile in the U.S., the National Security Agency is hacked, and its chief of security, Edwin Needham, vows revenge. Lisbeth Salander plays a central role in both plot lines, and the pleasure resides in watching Lagercrantz (Fall of Man in Wilmslow) corral an enormous cast of characters into an intricate story revolving around the larger-than-life hacker and her desire to right wrongs, including corporate espionage, a government spying on its own citizens, and violence against the defenseless. Two new characters make strong impressions: Jan Bublanski, a Stockholm detective with a humanistic bent, and Camilla Salander, Lisbeth's twin, who sets the stage for further Millennium novels. Lagercrantz, his prose more assured than Larsson's, keeps Salander's fiery rage at the white-hot level her fans will want. Agent: Magdalena Hedlund, Norstedts Agency (Sweden). (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
In 2013, journalist/biographer Lagercrantz (I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovi?) took on the unenviable task of continuing the story of the abrasive yet beloved Lisbeth Salander, created by the late Stieg Larsson. Shrouded in secret and controversy, this title had been anticipated and feared by fans of the original "Millennium" trilogy, but they need not be alarmed. Lagercrantz was meticulous in his attention to the characters and details laid out in Larsson's books (e.g., The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), and his dedication shows throughout this thrill ride of a fourth installment. Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist have gone their separate ways only to find themselves drawn back together by Frans Balder, an artificial intelligence developer who finds himself in over his head. Central to the complexly woven plot involving the National Security Agency (NSA), Swedish police, and the return of several familiar figures from the past is Balder's young autistic son, August, who shines an interesting light on Salander as a character, as well as her passion for justice. Verdict Full of all the hacking, attitude, and reckless action (including one exceptionally epic car chase) one expects from a Salander thriller, Lagercrantz's novel leaves the door open for further installments. Fans who have missed Larsson's iconic protagonists will delight in getting reacquainted. This whirlwind of nonstop action and intrigue is compulsively readable to the electrifying end. [See Prepub Alert, 4/15/15.]-Katie Lawrence, Grand Rapids, MI © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Lisbeth Sander returns, bruises raw and dander up, in this continuing installment of the late Stieg Larsson's crime series. Lisbeth is perhaps getting a little long in the tooth to be called a girl, but no matter: she still has a young person's aching desire to right the wrongs of the world. There are plenty of them, no doubt, but Swedish journalist/biographer Lagercrantz gives this the timeliest of spins by centering evil on the National Security Agency and its villainous operatives ("Ingram usually had a malicious grin on his face when he stuck a knife in someone's back"), who dig illicit sex and snappy repartee and all the usual things that bad guys enjoy. The NSA and its explosive chief data cowboy make perfect foils, as it happens, for Lisbeth and her cohort of hacking pals, bearing names like Trinity, Plague, and Bob the Dog. Lagercrantz follows the Larsson formula: take a more-or-less ordinary event, in this case a brittle battle over custody rights, and wrap it into a larger crime that the smaller one masks. It's not as if he doesn't skip a beat in doing so, but mostly he captures Larsson's patented tone, a blend of journalistic matter-of-factness and world-weariness. If the bad guys are sometimes cardboard cutouts, Lisbeth is fully rounded in her furyas one of them cries, "What kind of freak are you?" No ordinary one, as Larsson well established and Lagercrantz reinforces. Larsson's journalist hero/alter ego Mikael Blomkvist returns as well, bound in events while trying to do his work in the face of disappearing print, focus groups, and consultantsthe latter a force for evil as formidable as the spooks back at Fort Meade. "It was no bloody market analysis that had created the magazine," he fumes. "It was passion and fire." Passion and fire, check: there are plenty of both here and plenty of loose character-development ends to pick up in another sequel. Fast-moving, credible, and intelligently told. Larsson fans won't be disappointed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
