In David Lagercrantz' continuation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, Lisbeth Salander has disappeared. She's sold her apartment in Stockholm. She's gone silent electronically. She's told no one where she is. And no one is aware that at long last she's got her primal enemy, her twin sister, Camilla, squarely in her sights.
In David Lagercrantz ’s The Girl Who Lived Twice, Swedish IT wizard Lisbeth Salander is paired, as usual, in a mutually advantageous partnership with investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist ... it’s a murder mystery inside an espionage conspiracy wrapped in an action thriller—a unique concoction that should leave Salander’s legion of followers clamoring for more.
If this turns out to be, as Lagercrantz has suggested, the final installment in the series, it’s going out on a resounding tonic chord ... If this installment has a weakness, it’s that Blomkvist’s search, which leads to a tragedy that happened years before on Mt. Everest, seems unnecessarily complex. That might be fine in another novel, but here the reader wants more of Salander and less of mountain climbing. Fortunately, Lagercrantz, when he can get himself down the mountain, delivers in high style ... Salander is what she’s always been: a force to be reckoned with and one of the most memorable series leads in the history of crime fiction.
While Lagercrantz’s prose is more serviceable than the peculiarly clodhopping original writing, by this point the main characters have, sadly, become subject to the law of diminishing returns – in particular Salander, who is now just another all-purpose kick-ass heroine; despite the all-guns-blazing ending, there’s a half-heartedness to the story of her continued battle with twin sister Camilla. Far more intriguing, despite its unlikely beginnings, is the investigation into an ill-fated Everest expedition, although the necessity of shoehorning the narrative into the Millennium framework distances the action, thereby lessening its dramatic impact.
