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Review: New 'Dragon Tattoo' book a weak shadow of its predecessors

 
Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander in the Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest movie.
Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander in the Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest movie.
Published Aug. 31, 2015

Its full title is The Girl in the Spider's Web: A Lisbeth Salander Novel, Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series, but they might as well have called it The Girl Who's Going to Help Us Milk a Few More Million Out of This Dragon Tattoo Thing.

The fourth novel about punk hacker and dark avenging angel Lisbeth Salander and her sidekick, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, publishes today. The first three, written by Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson and published after he died at age 50 in 2004, have sold 80 million copies worldwide.

Spider's Web was written by another Swedish journalist, David Lagercrantz, previously best know for co-writing a soccer player's memoir. He was commissioned to write the book by Larsson's father and brother, who control the author's estate. They've been at odds with Larsson's longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsson; the couple never married and Larsson left no valid will, so she has no legal claims on his work. But she does possess a laptop on which she says he left a draft of a fourth novel in the Millennium series.

This is not that book. Lagercrantz wrote it from scratch, under widely publicized deep security. Some authors have successfully carried on series characters — Anthony Horowitz has channeled both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming well, and Ace Atkins has done the same with Robert B. Parker — but Lagercrantz is no Larsson.

Larsson was not a writer of exquisite prose, but he did have a knack for creating intricate but propulsive plots and foreboding, chilly atmosphere. His indelible achievement, though, is Salander — the product of a terribly damaging childhood who has willed herself into becoming a genius with computers and a fierce avenger of the abuse of women and children. (The original title of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was Men Who Hate Women.) She's a tiny, pierced, booted, solitary, ruthless superhero — and the main reason I and countless other readers devoured Larsson's books.

Spider's Web, alas, does not burnish her legend. (For one thing, she doesn't even show up until a third of the way into the book.) Instead, it's is a middling techno thriller that bogs down often and leaves Salander and Blomkvist stranded amid a welter of minor characters and indistinct subplots.

The book's action revolves around the murder of an expert in artificial intelligence and singularity theory. Frans Balder abandons a lucrative job in Silicon Valley to return to Sweden and reclaim the 8-year-old son he hasn't seen in years. August Balder is an autistic savant (and abused child) who doesn't speak but has amazing artistic talents.

Although they were a couple at the end of the third book, Blomkvist and Salander have now been out of touch for a while. From different directions, both are drawn into the Balder case and, after too long, reunited.

Lagercrantz's plot amounts mostly to trying to sort out which sinister government agency is spying on what greedy, ruthless corporation and/or which of them is selling secrets to greedy, ruthless gangsters. (Short answer: all of them.) It's frequently slowed down by long digressions into subjects ranging from black holes to the petty inside politics of Blomkvist's magazine, Millennium; one cartoonish filip is the appearance of Lisbeth's long-lost twin as an evil femme fatale.

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Salander is a far less complex character than she's been in the past, although her relationship to August is among the book's more interesting.

Larsson made Blomkvist a heroic figure (although always secondary to Salander), but Lagercrantz turns him into a Mary Sue — a term from fan fiction that means an overly idealized character who seems to be the author's wish fulfillment. Although the book first shows us Blomkvist suffering from criticism as a has-been who can't keep up with the media's move online, rarely does half a chapter go by without someone — from colleagues to enemies — singing his praises at length as a brilliant journalist, an unshakeable idealist, the "soul of the magazine" (which is under threat from corporate bean counters). Blomkvist himself, formerly a caffeine-fueled bundle of energy, seems depressed and disconnected in this book. Maybe he's tired of all the flattery. Or maybe he just misses Salander.

If this series continues — and you can bet your dragon tattoo it will if this book sells at all well — let's hope next time Lagercrantz gives us more Salander and less Mary Sue.

Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.