Goodreads blurb: In this adrenaline-charged thriller, genius-hacker Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist face a dangerous new threat and must again join forces.
Late one night, Blomkvist receives a phone call from a trusted source claiming to have information vital to the United States. The source has been in contact with a young female super hacker—a hacker resembling someone Blomkvist knows all too well. The implications are staggering.
Blomkvist, in desperate need of a scoop for Millennium, turns to Lisbeth for help. She, as usual, has her own agenda. In The Girl in the Spider’s Web, the duo who thrilled 80 million readers in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest meet again in an extraordinary and uniquely of-the-moment thriller.
============
When I first saw the promos of The Girl in the Spider’s Web I literally fell out of my chair as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was one of the books responsible for me restarting my crazy voracious reading habit all over again, and it had been quite a while after I had finished reading the Millennium Trilogy, almost all of four years now. And therefore when I heard that the series itself was going to be continued, albeit by a different author David Lagercrantz given that Stieg Larsson, the original author had passed away, I more than looked forward to what Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the protagonists would be upto in this book.
And to be fair to the author, the book didn’t disappoint at all, although it didn’t quite blow me away like the books in the original trilogy. While those books dealt more with the inner personal demons that both the protagonists were fighting in parallel with the evil designs of the antagonists, this book more or less focuses more on the narrative itself rather than delve too much into either Mikael or Lisbeth themselves. Well, given that a genius like Stieg Larsson created these characters and made them memorable, I completely understand why David Lagercrantz couldn’t quite live up to readers’ expectations in this regard. Both Mikael and Lisbeth are fairly complicated characters with extremely muddled up psyches, troubled pasts, extremely complex minds and therefore it followed that the author would not be able to add too much more value there.
However, where the book worked really well for me was the fact that the author took these two characters with all their strengths, failings, unique little quirks, made them his own and crafted what is truly a well-paced, cohesive and contemporary narrative. The overarching story is something that all of us are familiar with, the NSA and its ‘Big Brother’ snooping activities around the world, and the author injects a whole lot of energy into the book and proceedings simply by playing to Mikael and Lisbeth’s strengths. Another big plus for me was the presence of an extremely strong antagonist in this book, somebody from Lisbeth’s past, somebody scary, who made proceedings extremely interesting, and also ensured that there would be more books in this series as well.
In a nutshell, this book is a must read for all fans of the original Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, although they must be warned that this book is not as deep or layered as those books were. That being said, even readers who have not read the original trilogy can read this book and I can vouch that they will go ahead and read the trilogy after they finish this book.
Click here to purchase this book from Flipkart [Link] or Amazon [Link].
============
A review copy of this book was provided to me by the publishers in return for an honest and unbiased review of the same.
Click here to enter a Rafflecopter giveaway of The Millennium Trilogy and an additional book
//widget-prime.rafflecopter.com/launch.js
