Let’s dispense with this from the beginning: The Girl in the Spider’s Web, the fourth installment in the wildly popular Millennium series, shouldn’t exist. After submitting the first three books to his Swedish publisher, Stieg Larsson died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2004. Logically, the series should have died with him.
Lagercrantz’s writing does a respectable job of capturing Larsson’s intensity, and having last read a Millennium book about a year ago, I was hard-pressed to tell the difference in the author’s syntax. Other than a few clunky idioms (“Money talks, bullshit walks”) perhaps introduced in translation, there’s little to distract from the page-turning adventure.
