The girl with ice in her veins

Smirnoff's second Millennium novel (after The Girl in the Eagle's Talons) is a treat for longtime series fans. Several months after the events of the previous book, Lisbeth Salander's 13-year-old niece Svala Hirak is interning at the newspaper Gaskassen. She's also part of an environmental activist group, whose newest member, Simon Frisk, is an advocate for extreme--sometimes violent--protest. When Simon sexually assaults Svala and one of the teenage reporter's friends turns up murdered, she links up with a dangerous ally to take revenge. Meanwhile, Mikael Blomkvist is hired to helm Gaskassen fresh off of his cancer diagnosis, while Lisbeth searches for her hacker friend Plague, who has been kidnapped by Marcus Branco, the sadistic crime lord who killed Svala's mother and seeks a hard drive containing $400 million in bitcoin that only Svala can unlock. It's a lot of plot, and Smirnoff makes no room for newcomers to the series, assuming that readers have a near-photographic memory of details from the previous novels. Those who have been following along closely, however, will be rewarded with clever twists and poignant developments in the relationships among the core cast. This continues Smirnoff's hot streak. (Sept.)

Lisbeth Salander is back, and the body count is rising. "The girl has an eye for things, the sort of intuition that strips those wolves to the bare skin. Fourteen years of experience have refined this ability to perfection." Hacker and general mayhem agent Lisbeth Salander's niece, a Sami teenager named Svala Hirak, has inadvertently gotten herself into a fix in a far-northern Swedish mining town, and Lisbeth is on the scene to help. At Lisbeth's side, natch, is intrepid journalist Mikael Blomkvist, wrestling not just with evildoers but also with prostate cancer. The chief evildoer is a wheelchair-using (a sure sign of a villain in genre thrillers) tech billionaire (ditto) who's looking to round out his portfolio with a mining claim, and he's not at all shy of bumping off anyone who gets in his way. Svala, unfortunately, is tied up with an environmental group; coming over all Greta Thunberg, she tells a sneering interviewer, "We're not an organization…but a loose grouping of people who want to safeguard the value of the natural world and human life." Since our bad guy, Marcus Branco, doesn't get around so easily, he employs a number of bad people to do his dirty work, one of whom, the Cleaner ("He is someone who is morally easy to criticize"), makes for the most effective character in Smirnoff's rogues' gallery. As the story unfolds, it turns out that Branco is after something that only Svala can provide; to get it, a fellow hacker must betray Lisbeth-- never a good thing to do. The plot grinds along to an admittedly unexpected end, diverted frequently by the appearance of too many minor characters and too little dramatic tension. Still, Smirnoff has left room for a sequel, and one hopes it won't be a further diminution of Stieg Larsson's once-excellent series. An overstuffed slog in the Salander saga. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.