Book Review: The Girl In The Spider’s Web (no spoilers)

I still remember reading Steig Larsson’s Millennium series as if it was yesterday. My favourite of the 3 books was most definitely the first, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I was quite sad when it came to the end and knowing the author had passed away meant at that time there would be no continuation of the series.

I was surprised and overjoyed to hear that there would be a 4th book released. The fourth book would be written by David Lagercrantz who had been given permission by the Larsson estate to continue the series.

The new book in the series is called The Girl in the Spider’s Web. I was a little skeptical about going in to read this.  As much as I couldn’t wait to read more I was worried that Lagercrantz wouldn’t live up to the writing I had loved from Larsson.

When the book arrived even though it was a hardback I was taken aback by it’s size. While it’s not overly bulky it was taller than I expected. The cover was in keeping with the rest of the Millennium series books, with the torso of what I suspect is Lisbeth Salander in a metal studded belt and faint outline of the notorious dragon tattoo.

I opened the book and was greeted with a map of downtown Stockholm and a list of all characters with brief description from the previous books. I liked this as it has been a while since I read the others and could use the memory jogger.

Inside the book was split into 3 parts just as the others had been.

It took me about 6 days to read and I had a lot of stopping and starting thanks to my lovely little 16mth old but I throughly enjoyed it.

The chapters were a great length with breaks between aswell which really works for me in a book as I may only get 5 mins here and there depending on what is going on.

The story was easy to follow and very enjoyable.  I won’t go into the plot because I don’t want to ruin it too much for anyone who is just looking for info to make a decision whether or not to get it.

Lagercrantz writing style flowed so nicely, I couldn’t often tell the difference between his and Larssons work.

This is definitely a good I would go back to and read again. I had never heard of Lagercrantz before as an author but he seems the perfect choice for continuing the work left by Larsson.

According to an article in The Guardian , Larsson had a shadow outline for 10 books in the series. Unfortunately I cannot find any information to suggest whether a 5th book will be written and published but one can certainly hope.

For me The Girl in the Spider’s Web is the 2nd favourite in the Millennium series.

I would recommend anyone who enjoyed the first 3 to give this a read. The plot line is more like the first book rather than the 2nd and 3rd and there are more relationship twists to be had in the Bloomkvist / Salander relationship.

The only downsides to me in this book was the lack of a plot twist which I was hoping to see and I did feel that Bloomkvist tend to blather on sometimes and be a bit too moody for my liking.

As for a rating, I would give this book 8/10, the only reason it isn’t a 10 are the reasons listed above and that my mind wasn’t blown by the story. However don’t let that put you off the story is still very good:)

The Stationery Geekette x

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