6.16.2023 | Friday

The Girl in the Spider’s Web

Item: The Girl in the Spider's Web
Rating: 4.5
Author: Kim

category: Book Reviews
tag(s): adult
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title: The Girl in the Spider's Web
author: David Lagercrantz, Stieg Larsson
series: Millennium #4
published: 1 September 2015
publisher: Knopf
genre(s): thrillers
pages: 497
source: library
format: eBook
buy/shelve it: Amazon | B&N | StoryGraph | Goodreads

rating:

| series rating:

the blurb

She is the girl with the dragon tattoo—a genius hacker and uncompromising misfit. He is a crusading journalist whose championing of the truth often brings him to the brink of prosecution.

Late one night, Blomkvist receives a phone call from a source claiming to have information vital to the United States. The source has been in contact with a young female superhacker—a hacker resembling someone Blomkvist knows all too well. The implications are staggering. Blomkvist, in desperate need of a scoop for Millennium, turns to Salander for help. She, as usual, has her own agenda. The secret they are both chasing is at the center of a tangled web of spies, cybercriminals, and governments around the world, and someone is prepared to kill to protect it . . .

a few notes

content warning: ❗references to murder, abuse, domestic violence❗

steamy rating: 0🔥s
language level: 🤬🤬

POV: 3rd person
keywords/phrases: murder, family, abuse, espionage, theft, conspiracy

awards: Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Mystery & Thriller (2014)

my review

This book marks the first written in the aftermath of Stieg Larsson’s death, and the difference in writing style between Larsson and Lagercrantz is clear. Perhaps it’s because the world was born from Larsson’s style, which carried us through the three books, the “formative” years, but this first takes a bit to settle into. This is not to say it’s bad; it’s not. It’s just… different.

Different writing style or not, Lisabeth Salander continues to be one of my all-time favorite characters. She has all the makings of a fictional villain. She’s an antisocial, abrasive, hacker with a violent streak who thrives in the underbelly of the world. But she’s also a warrior, fighting against injustice (especially against women). I had fear that with a new writer, the magic that is her would disappear. It did not, although it did feel as if the author held back a bit in how he used her character in the novel. He pushed to her to a point, but that point felt slightly behind the line she went to in Larsson’s books. However, I suppose that is better than pushing a new-to-him character too far and ruining an icon by turning her into a caricature of herself.

About David Lagercrantz

David Lagercrantz, born in 1962, is a journalist and author, living in Stockholm. His first book was published in 1997, a biography of the Swedish adventurer and mountaineer Göran Kropp. In 2000 his biography on the inventor Håkan Lans, A Swedish Genious, was published. His breakthrough as a novelist was Fall of Man in Wilmslow, a fictionalised novel about the British mathematician Alan Turing. In David Lagercrantz’ writing you can often see a pattern: major talents who refuse to follow convention. He has been interested not only in what it takes to stand out from the crowd, but also in the resistance that such creativity inevitably faces.

In 2011 his best-selling sports biography I am Zlatan Ibrahimović was published, one of the most successful books in Sweden in modern times. The biography was nominated for the prestigious August Prize in 2012, as well as shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. To date, the book has been published in over 30 languages around the world and been sold in millions of copies.

In the summer of 2013, Lagercrantz was asked by Moggliden (the Larsson Estate) and Norstedts to write the fourth, free-standing sequel to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. The Girl in the Spider’s Web was published – in August 27, 2015 – simultaneously by 26 publishers (in 24 languages) worldwide, ten years after the Swedish publication of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

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About Stieg Larsson

Stieg Larsson (born as Karl Stig-Erland Larsson) was a Swedish journalist and writer who passed away in 2004.

As a journalist and editor of the magazine Expo , Larsson was active in documenting and exposing Swedish extreme right and racist organisations. When he died at the age of 50, Larsson left three unpublished thrillers and unfinished manuscripts for more. The first three books ( The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo , The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest ) have since been printed as the Millenium series. These books are all bestsellers in Sweden and in several other countries, including the United States and Canada.

Witnessed a rape when he was 15, and was helpless to stop it. This event haunted him for the rest of his life. The girl being raped was named Lisbeth, which he later used as the name of the heroine on his Millenium trilogy. Sexual violence against women is also a recurring theme in his work.

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