The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

Starred review from August 28, 2017
Lagercrantz’s excellent second contribution to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series finds Lisbeth Salander serving a two-month sentence in Flodberga, the only maximum security women’s prison in Sweden, for unlawful use of property and reckless endangerment stemming from a murder case chronicled in 2015’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Lisbeth doesn’t mind her incarceration, since it allows her to work on her attempt to combine quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity, but she’s annoyed that her section of the prison has been taken over by gang leader Benito Andersson, who’s torturing a beautiful young Bangladeshi prisoner, Faria Kazi, a convicted murderer. Lisbeth is also troubled by a visit from her old guardian, Holger Palmgren, who informs her that he has some startling information: Lisbeth might have been part of a study dealing with twins when she was a patient at St. Stefan’s psychiatric clinic for children. Determined to learn more about this study, Lisbeth asks her friend Mikael Blomkvist, editor of Millennium magazine, for help. After her release, Lisbeth investigates the case of the Bangladeshi prisoner, and Blomkvist delves into Lisbeth’s childhood. Eventually, these twisting plot lines tie together in this complicated, fascinating mystery. As a bonus, readers learn the meaning of the dragon tattoo on Lisbeth’s back. Agent: Magdalena Hedlund, Norstedts Agency (Sweden).