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The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye by David Lagercrantz

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I just finished reading The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (TGWTAEFAE), by David Lagercrantz. It’s the sequel to the The Girl in the Spider’s Web (TGITSW) that I reviewed here recently and the fifth book in the Millennium series that started with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. As you call surely know, the first three books were written by the (now deceased) Swedish author, Stieg Larsson.

The latest book reunites Lisbeth Salander, journalist Mikael Bloomkvist, magazine editor and on-again/off-again love interest of Bloomkvist, Erika Berger, and Salander’s former guardian, the now quite elderly lawyer Holger Palmgren. Camilla Salander, Lisbeth’s evil twin, virtually disappears in this story, which is sort of odd given that one of the main subjects of the book is the psychology of twins.

The book opens to find Lisbeth locked up in prison for two months related to charges brought against her from her actions in TGITSW. Her imprisonment itself seems a bit of a logical leap given the TGITSW, but logic flaws happen with disappointing regularity in this book in the Salander story. While in prison, Salander assumes responsibility for protecting a young woman from Bangladesh being abused by a prison gang headed by a sadistic lesbian skinhead who fancies herself a Mussolini devotee. Salander eventually intervenes in the abuse, with predictable results. Meanwhile, Salander is manipulating the prison warden into giving her internet access so that she can continue her research into her family as well as her hacking.

While Lisbeth’s in prison, Palmgren receives an odd visit from a woman who long ago worked in the psychiatric facility where Salander was imprisoned and abused for years. The woman leaves Palmgren with a stack of documents from the clinic, hinting at the real reasons Salander ended up in the facility.

Bloomkvist and Palmgren become convinced that the documents provide evidence in a (naturally or this wouldn’t be a book) larger government decades-old conspiracy vaguely related to ethnic cleansing. Bloomkvist eventually ends up tracking down a somewhat mysterious Swedish financier who may hold the key to unlocking the story.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as any of the first four in the series – primarily because of some logic flaws in the plot and that I was disappointed that Salander has almost become a caricature in this book – she’s just short of needing a cape. That said, Lagercrantz is a good writer – the pacing and the juxtaposition of scenes among characters and interposing timelines is really good and makes the story move along faster than it probably has any right to. It’s worth reading if you’ve read the first four books, but it isn’t a reason to start the series if you haven’t already.

The Girl In The Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz

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I just finished the 4thbook in the Millennium series – The Girl In The Spider’s Web(TGITSW). Published a couple of years ago (I’m still catching up), this is the sequel to the original three books – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy– written by Stieg Larsson. It’s been a few years since I read the original trilogy, but I remember my impressions as being: well plotted, maybe a bit clumsy as to writing, but with really great characters, especially when considered as to how they’d interact. No question that Lisbeth Salander is one of the best main characters in thriller fiction of the last couple of decades.

Larsson died of a heart attack having completed the three books while working on the fourth. I recall reading somewhere that he’d planned that the Millennium series would eventually be ten novels. It was clear from the trilogy that one or more, maybe all, of the future books would involve a character unseen but present in the first books. Spider’s Web is the start of that part of the story.

The main thrust of the TGITSW revolves around the NSA and Swedish Security Police’s involvement in possibly aiding and abetting industrial espionage. There’s an artificial intelligence aspect element to the plot, but it’s not especially significant, which is probably for the best as AI is probably difficult to write about to a general audience – certainly Lagercrantz doesn’t even attempt it. A Swedish computer academic working on developing AI, Frans Balder, uncovers possible collusion between the NSA, a large research corporation and elements of a sophisticated Russian criminal organization active in Scandinavia. Balder has a young son and a scandalously sleazy ex-wife. The boy, August, is an autistic savant unable to speak.

As is usual in the Millennium books, Blomkvist is world weary and the magazine is in financial trouble. Blomkvist stumbles across the NSA story when Balder calls him in the middle of the night wanting to tell all – thinking that publicly releasing what he knows will keep him and August safe from reprisals by the Russian gang. Balder is too late and pays for it with his life. What exactly he knows ends up being a bit of a MacGuffin– it is or isn’t revealed at the end and isn’t important for the denouement of the story.

As you’d guess, Salander finds she has a lot in common with August – I’m resisting the temptation to say they get on like a house on fire, but you get the idea. In Lagercrantz’s telling, Salander comes across as a bit of a Lara Cross-type character – almost a comic book heroine. Some of it may be due to the difficulty in stepping into someone else’s shoes in authoring the series and some of it probably is just a function of these kinds of thrillers always end up with characters who are less realistic than we expect (i.e. Jack Reacher, Kay Scarpetta, etc.).

All in all, I think that Lagercrantz does a better job plotting the book than Larsson did with the original three and he is definitely a more skilled fiction writer – the book deftly interweaves multiple points of view into a very fast paced timeline and at no point did I feel left behind as a reader. TGITSW was a good summer read.

I’ll definitely read the next book in the series.