The Girl in the Spider’s Web, by David Lagercrantz

Book 54 of 2015

Before the Gone Girl and Girl of the Train thriller hype, there was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

It has been a few years since I picked up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, but I had been waiting anxiously for the day that the fourth book in the Millennium series was announced and released. I was one of the many avid followers of the series, checking Wikipedia every six months, hoping for new information about the series to be announced each time. Well, the day I had been waiting for finally came: here is my review of The Girls in the Spider’s Web, by David Lagercrantz, continuing Stieg Larsson’s best-selling series.

Things haven’t changed much in protagonist Mikael Blomkvist’s world; despite being a famous journalist, his magazine is still struggling to stay afloat. He needs a big story, and fast. Lucky for him, he gets a dangerous–but intriguing– tip…

This tip leads him to an old friend that he hasn’t spoken to in quite some time, the one and only Lisbeth Salander.

Salander is hard to track down at first, but she and Mikael both are working towards the same goal, so they ultimately must come together once again to put together pieces of an extremely difficult puzzle. Murder, kidnapping, and mystery are all wrapped into one in this page-turning thriller and I was up late at night crossing my fingers for all my favourite characters (and some new ones) to succeed.

Like all of the Millennium series books, this one took me a few chapters to really get ‘into’ it. I also expected the story to mirror Stieg Larsson’s writing, and while Lagercrantz’s prose is a bit different that Larsson’s (as to be expected), I should have known better. Once I got over the fact that I was not going to be reading Larsson’s work, but instead an excellent continuation of the characters in a new chapter in their lives, I began to settle into the book more and appreciate it for the fast-paced thriller that it is.

I can only hope that Lagercrantz continues writing for the series, and that these characters stay alive in the literary world for years to come. They are too good not to.