New Salander tale redirects the story
Sometimes, death isn’t the end. Sometimes, after the heart of a great mystery writer stops beating, his or her characters raise a glass in tribute, and then continue down those mean streets of their crime series.
Stieg Larsson died in 2004 — before his three Lisbeth Salander novels became international phenomena — but Swedish author David Lagercrantz has continued Larsson’s series. The fourth adventure, “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” received terrific reviews, many praising Lagercrantz for evoking Larsson’s numbed noir atmosphere while eradicating his worst stylistic tics.
“The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye,” Lagercrantz’s latest Salander novel, is even bolder. It takes Salander on a quest into her ■ origins, with plotlines about religious fundamentalism and the Russian mafia’s long tentacles.
The story opens with Salander entering a prison cell. She’s serving a twomonth sentence for actions she took (in the preceding novel) to safeguard a child. On the way into her cell, Salander notes an inmate — a Bangladeshi woman named Faria — is being roughed up by the prison’s resident sadist. Salander eventually intervenes — of course — and puts the sadist temporarily out of business.
At the same time, Salander grows more curious about the religiously sanctified abuse that drove gentle Faria over the edge and landed her in prison for murder. As fans know, when Salander gets curious, nothing can keep her away from a laptop.
Meanwhile, on the outside, Holger Palmgren, Salander’s elderly former guardian, receives a surprise visit from a stranger who once worked at the children’s psychiatric clinic where Salander spent some of her grimmest years. The woman turns over clinic documents, which mention something known as “The Registry.”
Salander, along with Palmgren and journalist Mikael Blomkvist, becomes convinced that this “Registry” holds clues not only to her identity but also to a larger crime perpetrated decades ago against children of ethnic minorities. As usual, a little knowledge proves to be dangerous.
Larsson had grand ambitions for his series, projecting 10 novels. In Lagercrantz’s hands, the series is realizing grand ambitions of another sort.
“The Girl Who Takes an Eye for An Eye” intensifies the mythic elements of Larsson’s vision and moves the series deeper into the realms of “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter.”
A little of this legendary stuff goes a long way in Salander’s hard world, though, and the girl at the center of this tale is starting to look like somebody we readers only used to know.