Final 'Girl With Dragon Tattoo' novel arrives in bookshops

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – It is only right that a best-selling novel series about an unstoppable computer-hacker assassin should go out with a bang.

In The Girl Who Lived Twice, hitting bookstore shelves in 30-odd countries this month, Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson’s anti-heroine Lisbeth Salander is back for a high-paced final instalment of the Millennium saga.

The last in the series – which kicked off in 2005 with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – is a tale of political scandal, death, power games and lashings of Nordic noir.

It wraps up a six-part, best-selling social commentary on contemporary Sweden, the threat of technology to individual liberties, and violence against women.

For the finale, Salander is in Moscow to settle a long-running feud with evil twin sister Camilla, before becoming embroiled in a cat-and-mouse chase with Russian gangsters.

Her sidekick is Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist who calls on Salander to help trace the identity of a homeless man whose last words pointed to damaging secrets at the highest levels of government.

It is this kind of psychological suspense which helped the series sell about 100 million copies around the globe.

The series was created by Larsson, a Swedish investigative journalist who specialised in covering far-right politics. But his fame came posthumously.

He died at 50 from a heart attack in 2004, a year before the release of the first book in the series, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, followed by The Girl Who Played With Fire (2006) and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest (2007).

After the first three novels were published, another Swede, David Lagercrantz was commissioned to finish the saga.

Books number four and five in the series, The Girl In The Spider’s Web (2015) and The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye (2017), went on to sell 14 million copies.

“For me, it’s over,” Lagercrantz told AFP.

“But Lisbeth is immortal. She will live on in one way or another, in TV, cinema or in other books.”

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