The Girl in the Spider's Web: A Lisbeth Salander Novel

David Lagercrantz has, amid great controversy, taken over the series from deceased Stieg Larsson (see my earlier posts on Larsson's trilogy). There are several stories running on parallel tracks here. Millennium Magazine is again struggling financially and people, as usual, are out to undermine Mikael Blomkvist to keep him from revealing dirty secrets. A huge media conglomerate provided a monetary infusion a few years ago but now are threatening to pull the plug if Millenium does not change focus and put Mikael on foreign assignment, effectively getting him out of the country. In the meantime, our favorite hacker, Lisbeth, has just managed to breach the firewalls of the NSA and given them a nasty little shock; their main IT security guy, Ed Needham, is incensed and swears he is going to find and gut whoever hacked into his system. A reclusive computer genius, Frans Balder, comes home from working in Silicon Valley to take up the care of his autistic son, August, because he fears August was being abused by Balder's ex-wife's partner, an alcoholic actor. When Balder is murdered, the mute child is the only witness. Mikael has learned through his network of the NSA breach and is pretty sure Salander is behind it but he can't fathom why she would bring so much heat down on her head. He contacts her to get information about Balder. It turns out that Lisbeth was already involved and figured out which of Balder's assistants had sold his secret AI research to the highest bidder. Lisbeth rescues August from an assassination attempt and goes into hiding, discovering that he has a savant's ability to draw and can, in fact, identify his father's killer. Balder's killers were hired by none other than Lisbeth's evil and devastatingly beautiful fraternal twin sister, Camilla. HUH?! Who knew she had a sister...I don't remember any reference to this in earlier books. Camilla wants to destroy Lisbeth for helping to get her beloved father killed. Of course Lisbeth wins this round, but Camilla is still out there somewhere. The reviews vary in their praise or lack thereof: Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times. Still, if you liked the earlier books, you'll probably be perfectly happy with this one. There is a further sequel, also by Lagercrantz, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye.