One is an ageing, ailing Mad Scientist with a doctor’s bag of syringes and lethal poisons who is determined that nothing of her social eugenics programme will be revealed. This time there are two female arch-villains after Salander. Lagercrantz has turned Larsson’s eccentric and feral feminism into a simple inversion. ![]() Lagercrantz has all the elements of the Millennium series at his disposal, but the adrenaline is missing The author commits the cardinal thriller sin of telling rather than showing what she does: there are long, mansplaining sections about genetics and social research that made me pray to Elmore Leonard, the god of economical thriller writing, who famously instructed that writers should “try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip”. When she does wander on to the page, she gets beaten up or does stuff on her computer, but remains ghostly and uninhabited. The story starts with Salander in prison for unconvincing reasons. The Girl Who Took an Eye for an Eye is billed as the revelation of the appalling things done to Salander when she was a child, but the narrative meanders between a bewildering array of storylines that never come together. Blomkvist, the old-school social justice warrior with a penchant for underdogs and a hatred of social hypocrisy, provided a perfect foil. With Blomkvist, she was the glamorous half of one of the oddest but most effective and entertaining crime fiction couples. She took the kind of revenge on rapists and paedophiles that most only fantasise about, taking on powerful, corrupt men with righteous but lawless violence. Obsessive and antisocial, she was forged in the crucible of violence she experienced as a child. Damaged, dysfunctional heroines are common in thrillers, as are layers of gendered trauma, but Larsson’s Salander was a fabulous, surprising character – a feminist superhero, an Amazonian queen, a Lolita who fought back.
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