Stieg Larsson Heroine Lisabeth Salander Back in‘The Girl in the Spider Web’

Swedish author, David Lagercrantz, was given the task of continuing the adventures of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo series with its intrepid heroine, Lisbeth Salander. It has been a decade since to sudden death of creator, Stieg Larsson. When Larsson's brother and father decided not to walk away from Sweden's number one punk goddess, a successor had to be chosen. It wasn't a question of if, more like a matter of when and who. In stepped Lagercrantz and from that sprang the book, The Girl in the Spider Web. The publishing team took extreme precautions to make sure there were no surprise leaks of content on to the internet and they did the job quite well.

Already a well established writer with nine best sellers to his credit, Lagercrantz was offered the opportunity to continue the famous line of novels by publishers and was given the blessings of the controllers of Stieg Larsson's estate. Everyone admired the way the author, according to the South China Post, "wrote about complex geniuses."

The pressure is on Lagercrantz to aid in the revival of the slumping sales of the novels. The over bloated and disappointing Hollywood version of the Salander saga take more than their fair share of blame for declining interest in Lisbeth Salander's adventures.

Still, security around the book's writing was tighter than a Kim Kardashian dress. The Hollywood Reporter says, "The entire book was written on an air-gap computer - that is one totally disconnected from the internet - that was locked in a safe each evening, and the final manuscript was hand-delivered to the publisher. In late May, when a few journalists were given a sneak peek at Book Expo, the annual publishing convention in New York, the meetings were not held at the Javits Center where the convention was in full swing but at a nondescript hotel blocks away amidst secrecy and high security."

Reviews, however, have been lukewarm at best. Many feel the heart that Larsson gave the story, and Salander, just isn't there in Lagercrantz's book. The Washington Post's online review said, "Authorized by Larsson's father and brother, who were his heirs, and written by Swedish writer David Lagercrantz, the new book brings back Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, the heroes and occasional lovers of the trilogy. It's fitfully interesting, but more often the story is disjointed and annoying."