AN IMMORTAL HEROINE
Hacker Lisbeth Salander is back in this fifth novel in the Millennium series, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye. Standing barely five feet tall, Salander towered over her author almost as soon as she first appeared in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo nearly a decade ago. Stieg Larsson was dead by then, leaving three unpublished novels about an orphaned and abused girl who uses her digital mastery to hunt down her enemies and amass wealth (which she uses to hunt down more enemies). They immediately became bestsellers, and David Lagercrantz was tapped to continue the series.
Unlike the girl who speaks in cryptic sentence fragments, the Millennium books themselves are chatty, topical, and spend lots of time on dining and making love. Lagercrantz’s novel has all that plus some set pieces, like a philosophical and psychological deconstruction of the financial markets that will resonate with readers of crime fiction who own one sorry mutual fund. The world today is recreated in all its post-truth, alternative-facts complexity. But at some point we become focused deeply on Salander’s story and desperate to find out what happens next.
Our favourite characters are in form. The reader’s proxy is, as always, the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who is orbited by obliging females—colleagues, exes, a sister, and the enigma that is Salander herself. Among the new characters we begin to care about is the dark-eyed Faria, a Bangladeshi imprisoned first by her fundamentalist brothers and then by the State. Her man, Jamal Chowdhury, is targeted for his blogging about free speech and human rights, and killed for having loved Faria. Leo Mannheimer, diffident musical genius and heir to a financial empire, discovers that he was the subject of a cruel psychological experiment. The villains are various and terrifying.
If you’re waiting for the sexual tension between Blomkvist and Salander to blaze again, hang on till the next novel. They barely bump into each other in this one, though they are texting and collaborating throughout to bring down the psychologists who decided, twenty-some years ago, that to manipulate the futures of children was in the interest of science and humanity, and that to cover up their crimes they must murder their accusers.
Salander ropes them in and walks away, scratched up but sure to return bigger and badder than ever.
The world today is recreated in all its post-truth, proxy facts complexity