Hot vengeance a dish best served cold
The fifth installment of the Millennium Series soars
“THE GIRL WHO TAKES AN EYEFOR AN EYE” By David Lagercrantz Alfred A. Knopf ($27.95) Hacker extraordinaire Lisbeth Salander and crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist do social good as the thrills accelerate in “The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye.” They’re a winning couple.
This book is the fifth installment in the Millennium Series the late Stieg Larsson launched in 2005 with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” It is the second “Girl” thriller by David Lagercrantz, who first extended the Larsson tradition with “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” in 2015.
Lisbeth Salander is in prison on a trumped-up charge and eager to break out. She’s set against Benito Andersson, a fearsome deviate who has Faria Kazi, a gorgeous Bengali and a Sunni, under her sadistic thumb. Kazi fell for a freethinking Muslim against the will of her older, oppressive brothers. Salander is Kazi’s defender. Jamal Chowdhury, Faria’s love, is killed when he’s pushed off a train platform. Salander and Blomkvist are on that case, a case with tentacles.
Salander, always curious about her origins, also is eager to acquire information that Holger Palmgren, an elderly lawyer and longtime friend, has on the agency that separated her from her sister Camilla, putting Salander under the control of Peter Teleborian, a sadistic psychoanalyst who figured heavily in “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” the last Millennium book Larsson wrote (Larsson died in 2004; the whole series is posthumous).
Benito, meanwhile, is somehow connected to Camilla, Salander’s evil twin, and Camilla is linked to the Russian Mafia, which supported Alexander Zalachenko, the girls’ father, who brutalized their mother.
Camilla and Lisbeth were separated by the Registry, a shadowy government agency that manipulated genetics in the name of beneficial social experimentation. Like Leo Mannheimer and Dan Brady, mirror twins who slide into the book midway, the Salander women are victims of eugenics. And the perpetrators, including the horrific Rakel Greitz, are still on their cases, to protect their own hides and reputations.
The setup is clever — the contrasts between the two sets of twins is an inspired tension device — and complicated. Mr. Lagercrantz knows how to put wheels in motion, and he skillfully navigates locales and protagonists. However, he often uses dialogue to convey exposition, rendering several conversations between Blomkvist and Malin Frode, the reporter’s latest object of desire, less than credible. Pillow talkis rarely this ponderous.
Mr. Lagercrantz also frequently deploys the literary equivalent of the cinematic dissolve in abrupt shifts to earlier times. The connective tissue runs a tad thin in this book despite its compelling, slowly intertwining storylines.
What storylines these are: Salander’s investigation into the links between Faria Kazi’s older brothers, Faria’s scourge Benito, and the Russian Mafia; the toxic agenda and nefarious activities of the Registry for the Study of Genetics and Social Environment; the twins Leo and Dan, who are among the more fully realized characters and could spawn a novel of their own; the musical undercurrents that animate those twins, affirming Mr. Lagercrantz’s mastery of musical theory and including a cool salute to the obscure jazz figure Mezz Mezzrow; the narrower, effectively told tales of women such as the Registry’s icy Greitz and the tortured Hildavon Kaltenborg.
Mr. Lagercrantz, as was Larsson, is particularly adept at portraying women. Salander is a powerful figure both physically and intellectually. Her character sets the bar in these novels, which are powerful antidotes to sexism.
Don’t read the “Girl” books, which are translated from the Swedish, for their poetry. Read them for their ingenious plots and their concerns: justice, liberation from prejudice, a fierce feminism, a quest for truth. They’re based in journalism and forensics and they keep up with the times via characters like Salander and Plague, the internet clairvoyant who always come through for her. Like the other books in the Millennium Series, “The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye” holds your attention from the jump — and doesn’t let go.