The Girl in the Spider's Web
David Lagercrantz
Based on the characters created by Stieg Larsson
Translated from the Swedish by George Goulding
Maclehose Press. First published 2015
This book is fan fiction. Poor fan fiction, at that. There is very little original in it, except, perhaps, the lack of quality. We meet Michael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander for the fourth time, (after The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, and the two other books) as they try to rescue and look after an autistic savant boy called August, who helps Salander decrypt a file she has downloaded from the NSA server after hacking it. She uncovers a conspiracy by NSA officials and some Russian gangsters to steal industrial secrets and sell them. The story meanders back and forth between Salandar, Blomkvist, various crooks, the police, and the NSA. All characterizations are halfhearted and stereotyped (computer experts are slobs, autistic children are geniuses...), the conversations are boring, and the action sequences are tepid. Only the character of Lisbeth Salander (which Lagercrantz has degraded, but not completely) keeps the interest alive till the end. The first three books in the Millenium series were not great, but at least we had Lisbeth, and we had some great action.
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