The latest thrillers and historical books reviewed

The Girl Who Lived Twice **** Jake Kerridge reviews three gripping thrillers

by David Lagercrantz

(Maclehose Press, £20)

Stieg Larsson died after writing only three books about his angsty, indomitable heroine Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo. When his fellow Swedish author

David Lagercrantz wrote a sequel, The Girl

In The Spider’s Web, one wondered if he was channelling Larsson’s spirit, so well did he capture the character.

But in his second sequel, The Girl Who

Takes An Eye For An Eye, Lagercrantz seemed to be losing interest in Salander, distracted by pursuing new characters and storylines. Should the series have been retired – or another writer found?

The good news is that Salander is centrestage again in Lagercrantz’s latest sequel. At the end of the last book, she vowed to take revenge on her long-term nemesis, her beautiful but evil twin sister Camilla, and now she is on the case, while shacked up with a new girlfriend whom she has rescued from an abusive husband.

As always, topical left-wing politics are the lifeblood of the book. Camilla has chummed up with a very modern villain: a Russian mafioso who runs a string of troll factories that pollute the world with fake news.

Meanwhile, Salander’s old pal Mikael Blomkvist is wringing his hands over the murder of a beggar he walked past every day and ignored – regarding himself, of course, as symptomatic of the “new broken Stockholm”.

This book is much more in the spirit of the Larsson novels than its predecessor and Lagercrantz clearly understands and adores Larsson’s characters, even the minor ones.

But he could afford to be less respectful of Blomkvist, a bore who deserves to be demoted to a cameo role.

This is a pacy read and much tighter than the sometimes irritatingly long-winded Larsson books, while still finding room for some nice eccentric touches. In the final analysis, though, it lacks something of the soul of the originals.

Platform Seven **** by Louise Doughty

(Faber, £14.99)

The original Swedish title of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo translates as “Men Who Hate Women” and that would also make a good title for the collected works of Louise Doughty.

Her most famous novel, Apple Tree Yard, which became a smashing drama on BBC television, features a woman in trouble after the man who has raped and stalked her is murdered. But in real life, abusive men tend to end up killing rather than being killed, and that is what her latest novel is about.

It’s the story of the relationship between Lisa, an English teacher, and Matty, a doctor. Matty is a smooth-talking psycho who knows how to hurt Lisa without leaving a bruise. The swine even uses her love of poetry and fiction against her when she starts to question his behaviour, accusing her of over-imagination.

Nothing could be more gripping than the story of how Lisa initially tries to explain away Matty’s weirdness to herself and then, as the situation escalates, she makes brave but hopeless attempts to escape the relationship – until in the course of one such attempt, she dies. That’s not a spoiler, as we know from the start of the book that Lisa is dead. The novel takes the form of a narrative by Lisa’s ghost, who haunts Peterborough Railway Station, the place where she died.

In her afterword, Doughty talks about the

“understandable bafflement” of the many people she interviewed to get a sense of what day-to-day life is like at the station.

I must say,

I share that bafflement. As Lisa’s ghost floats around the station commenting on the comings and goings of the staff and passengers, I wondered if Doughty had taken on a bet to write a novel about Peterborough Railway Station and make it interesting. I’m not sure she succeeded.

Fortunately, once the book is properly under way and Lisa starts telling us about her life rather than her afterlife, we spend less time at the station and the book becomes unputdownable and finally very moving.

The Perfect Wife *** by JP Delaney

(Quercus, £12.99)

The main narrator of JP Delaney’s third psychological thriller – following the highly successful The Girl Before and Believe Me

– is Abbie, the wife of a tech genius and entrepreneur called Tim. Well, no, that’s not quite true. Abbie died in mysterious circumstances some years earlier but Tim has found a way to upload her memories into one of the robots that his company makes – “cobots” or cohabitation robots, which can be designed to look just like lost loved ones. So she looks, thinks and feels like Abbie.

Tim is a shifty character, however, and this is as much a novel of domestic suspense as a scientific thriller, as we learn what really happened to the old Abbie.

It’s a bit of a hodgepodge. The book is very touching when dealing with Abbie’s relationship with her autistic son – the author has an autistic child himself. But at other times, the prose is uninspiring and the characterisations a bit thin. So when the ethical issues around making artificially intelligent robots are rehearsed, you feel rather like you’re listening to The Moral Maze instead of reading a story about real people. But the twists are primed and deployed with a master craftsman’s skill.