Details on Millennium’s fifth instalment shrouded in secrecy

Very little has been revealed about plot, but author promises intrigue

In the cult Millennium crime fiction series, Stieg Larsson created Lisbeth Salander as a tattooed hacker out to get revenge on her persecutors. But in the latest book, author David Lagercrantz appears to have put his own stamp on the invincible character, throwing her into prison.

The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye, the fifth novel, is due to hit bookstores on September 7 in 26 countries.

“I’m waiting for the storm,” Lagercrantz said with a nervous laugh at his fashionable Stockholm apartment.

Swedish publishing house Norstedts has gone to great lengths to keep details shrouded in secrecy, given what is at stake. The previous book, The Girl in the Spider’s Web from 2015, also written by Lagercrantz, sold six million copies in 47 countries. The first three books, by the late Stieg Larsson, sold 80 million copies in 50 countries.

Emotional and highstrung, Lagercrantz, 54, is full of contradictions: he at once fascinates, annoys and elicits sympathy. With the book’s release date looming, he admits to having mixed feelings.

He is relieved at having finished the manuscript, but also terrified by critics, some of whom will not forgive him for taking over the series from compatriot Larsson, who died suddenly of a heart attack at age 50 in 2004 before the series gained global fame.

“There are a lot of translators who have just received it via an encrypted link, it’s all very secretive. Now we are beginning to get some feedback and, fingers crossed and touch wood, it seems promising.” Very little has been revealed about the plot. As with the preceding tome, details are trickling out, drop by drop. “All I can say is that I started out by putting her in prison, in the worst kind of women’s prison, where she immediately encounters quite a few problems,” Lagercrantz says without divulging more. Readers will also reacquaint themselves with investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

Lagercrantz says bringing Salander to life, with her troubled past, is a challenge – he would have written an entirely different leading character. “I would have created a softer heroine, someone nicer, more delicate and sensitive than Stieg Larsson did.”

But he acknowledges she makes for a good read. “Lisbeth’s personality, her iconic personality, needs problems. So of course I have to give her tonnes of problems. ” –