A complicated and dark mystery thriller.
This is the 8th book in the Millenium series and its third author as the books featuring Sweden’s Lisbeth Salander continue. Lisbeth is a trauma survivor and is more of an anti-heroine in most of the stories. She’s full of tattoos and piercings and definitely has her own moral code though she typically goes after any man who hurts a woman. With her fighting skills and photographic memory, she’s hard to forget or to come up against.
In this novel, Lisbeth takes a back seat to her precocious niece, Svala, who at age 13, is already a talented writer and a confirmed environmental activist. Svala has gotten involved with a group of activists who are protesting development of new mines in Gasskas. It also happens that Lisbeth’s friend and best hacker, Plague, has been kidnapped and taken north. As luck would have it, Mikael Blomkvist, happens to get a new job revamping a local newspaper in Gasskas so those three are there together when it all goes down.
This was very slow moving at first and it wasn’t until the last part of the book that the action picked up. Not a lot of concentration on Lisbeth or her unique skills, as the shift to Svala as some kind of kid genius. Lots of deaths per usual and lots of icky people. Sometimes the writing is so ambiguous that the reader isn’t sure what is going on and so I was confused at times. Although there is as character list at the beginning, it’s hard to keep the relationships of some of the characters straight so I’d advise you to keep that handy. Also, this isn’t a book you can jump into if you haven’t read the other books in the series. I’d suggest you start from the beginning. Too much backstory.
Unfortunately, the plot just didn’t keep my interest and this is not my favorite of the series. I wanted more Lisbeth doing her thing and less about her romantic woes. Not ready for Svala to take the lead or for Lisbeth to train her up. Blomkvist is getting up there in age so we need a new guy pal to be Lisbeth’s wingman so he can get over Lisbeth and take a break.
I tried to listen to the audio book while also following along in the e-book ARC provided to me by the publisher. The narrator, Simon Vance, didn’t work for me. His voice drove me crazy and he sounded like an old man and mumbled. Everyone sounded the same and the accents for different people weren’t always that great. I had to stop listening. Usually an audio book enhances a book for me but not in this case.
This is book #8 in the series which should be read from the beginning in order.
Tags and genre, mystery thriller, crime fiction, vigilante, hacker, Nordic noir, Scandinavian, Sweden
No comments:
Post a Comment