Formulaic, but it’s a formula that still works, as Salander and assorted bad guys spread righteous mayhem wherever they go.
Lisbeth Salander is back for her sixth adventure (The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye, 2017, etc.), and she’s got vengeance on her mind.
A small man, not 5 feet tall, sweats his way through a Stockholm heat wave wearing an expensive parka, an unusual accoutrement given his otherwise ragtag appearance. He dies. In his pocket the authorities find a scrap of paper bearing crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist’s phone number. Why? Blomkvist has been busy taking down a Russian troll factory that has been seeding the media with propaganda and lies. Not coincidentally, Salander is in Moscow. She’s cleaned up nicely for the occasion: “Her piercings were gone and she was wearing a white shirt and her black suit…because it had become habit and she wanted to blend in better.” There’s nothing like launching a full-bore assault on a crime-lord sister and her nasty entourage to call attention to yourself, however conservative the appearance. This being Stieg Larsson by way of Lagercrantz, there’s a deeply tangled plot underneath all this, involving politicians with questionable records, hackers, motorcycle gangs, and cops who are lucky to be able to tie their shoes in the morning. More, Lagercrantz stirs in improbable elements, including superhuman DNA—not just Salander and her family, with their “extreme genetic features,” but also our poor dead beggar, whose story ties in with Sherpas on Everest, a murder plot, and a high-up member of Sweden’s seemingly orderly government. Toss in small subplots—a fling Salander has with an abused woman whose ill-behaved husband requires serious correction as only the tattooed genius can deliver it, for instance (“Then she put tape over his mouth and eyed him the way a wild beast eyes its prey”). If Lagercrantz strays into Smilla’s Sense of Snow levels of unlikelihood in weaving all these threads, he writes economically, and though he works ground he’s covered in his two earlier contributions to the series, disbelief suitably suspended, it all makes for good bloody fun.
Formulaic, but it’s a formula that still works, as Salander and assorted bad guys spread righteous mayhem wherever they go.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49434-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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