Wall Street Journal Review of 'The Girl in the Spider's Web'

Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” series did no favors to the book-tour industry, selling scores of millions of copies despite the fact that Larsson died before his books were published. He made the fatal miscalculation of climbing seven flights of stairs, which apparently triggered a heart attack. Larsson’s demise in 2004 at age 50—in Stockholm, where he lived—was followed by bickering over his money and legacy. As it turns out, his characters are getting on very well without him, thanks to Swedish journalist David Lagercrantz, who keeps the “Millennium” brand humming in “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.” Mr. Lagercrantz has big shoes to fill. The first three Larsson books—“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (2005), “The Girl Who Played With Fire” (2006) and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” (2007)—sold 80 million copies world-wide, 24 million in the U.S. But Mr. Lagercrantz has more than met the challenge. Larsson’s brainchildren are in good hands and may have even come up a bit in the world. Crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, a kind of alter ego for Larsson, is still at the center of the action, running Millennium magazine and, as he sees it, speaking truth to power. He is slightly older and creakier than he was at the end of the trilogy; still, he is holding his own, despite being under attack from social-media dolts who are appalled that he is not on Facebook and Twitter. He also finds himself at odds with a sleazy media executive named Ove Levin, whose company now owns a third of Millennium’s shares and who is pressuring the magazine to modify its content: “Surely it was not necessary for all the articles to be about financial irregularities, injustices and political scandals.” Levin would prefer more celebrity news—and more light material for the youth market. Death by shareholder activism isn’t Blomkvist’s biggest problem, though. The major villains he faces in “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” are the masterminds of a shady tech company, some computer- and pistol-savvy Russian thugs, and the eavesdroppers at the U.S. National Security Agency, the world’s unsolicited companion. For all these culprits, the tech is high and the motives are low: more money, more power. Some things never change. A good deal of the novel’s drama revolves around solving the murder of Frans Balder, a computer genius who has come to have second thoughts about his work in artificial intelligence. He has also been a “lousy father” and has returned to Sweden from California to reunite with his 8-year-old autistic son, whose mother, with her drunken lout of a boyfriend, has created a toxic home environment for the child. Balder, we are told, wants “to start living, to no longer bury himself in quantum logarithms and source codes and paranoia.” He also has something important to tell Blomkvist—though the revelation is aborted when Balder meets his un-maker. Mr. Lagercrantz dispatches Balder with a minimum of splatter, a show of restraint that is also evident in the book’s treatment of sex. Larsson, by contrast, favored blow-by-blow accounts. Otherwise, the narrative voice and prose style of “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” are close to those of the trilogy: sturdy and reliable though not particularly stylish—a high-mileage Volvo that carries the reader along with efficiency. Mr. Lagercrantz definitely shares Larsson’s love of Lisbeth Salander, the punkish, tatted waif and hacker whose chief talent is to remind us that revenge is a dish best served piping hot. He keeps her offstage for the opening chapters, but when the dragoness enters the story she speeds it up nicely, joining in various subplots aimed at thwarting the evils of the NSA and avenging Balder’s death. Lisbeth is the franchise character, a damsel who imposes distress on all the right people and, while hardly vain, is pleasantly self-aware. When asked if she is insane, she replies, “Probably yes,” adding that she likely suffers from “empathy deficit disorder. Excessive violence. Something along those lines.” But she has a good heart and excellent aim, and she works well with children, or at least with Balder’s autistic son, who helps her bring the villains to heel, if only temporarily. She’s also tough. When she takes a slug through the shoulder, there’s no national health care for her. Instead she swallows a few antibiotic pills and goes to the gym to box. Lisbeth is joined by other characters who are unconventionally appealing. A highly accomplished hacker named Plague “was not a man who normally showered or changed his clothes much” and who “spent his whole life in front of the computer.” Others, we learn from background sketches, spent their youth indulging in various addictions or pursuing the delights of street crime. Most now live on fast food (one almost assumes that McDonald’s paid for product placement). But they are blazingly good with numbers. As it unfolds, “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” is very much a geek drama, though Mr. Lagercrantz makes sure that the innumerate will learn a few things, such as the fact that encryption algorithms “take advantage of the difficulties involved in prime number factorization. Prime numbers have become secrecy’s best friends.” Lisbeth and her hacker team are guided by the ancient observation that power corrupts, “especially power without control,” which brings them into conflict with Edwin Needham, top security man for the NSA. His world is turned upside down when he receives a mysterious message: “Those who spy on the people end up themselves being spied on by the people.” Lesser villains come and go. Christians and monogamy are as popular as pancreatic cancer with this crowd. Evil hitman Jan Holster recites a condensed version of the Lord’s Prayer—“thy will be done, amen”—before ventilating innocent skulls. But the novel’s overarching evil is greed. A Swedish security cop shudders “at the creeping realization that we live in a twisted world where everything, both big and small, is subject to surveillance, and where anything worth money will always be exploited.” This kind of pronouncement is very much in the Stieg Larsson spirit: The rich and powerful are different—they have more money and fewer scruples and need to be knocked into shape by righteous journalists and fearless waifs. When the curtain falls one senses that future exploitation is inevitable -- including the exploitation of Larsson's fictional characters -- leaving readers with the hope that Mr. Lagercrantz avoids the stairs.

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