The Girl in the Spider’s Web, the fourth instalment in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, will be published by Penguin Canada in North America on Sept. 1, marking the continuation of one of the most successful book franchises of the 21st century.
There will be a different author’s name on the dust jacket this time around.
The novel, whose title and cover were announced on Tuesday, is written by David Lagercrantz, who was hand-picked by both the publisher and the estate of Stieg Larsson, who died in 2004 before the publication and worldwide success of his trilogy of crime novels.
In a statement, Larsson’s brother, Joakim, and father, Erland, praised the 52-year-old Lagercrantz, a former crime reporter and the author of several novels and works of non-fiction, including the bestselling memoirs of Swedish soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimovic, as “highly suited to the task. David is a skilled writer who has portrayed odd characters and complex geniuses throughout his career. He will be doing it his own way.”
The Girl in the Spider’s Web is a wholly original work and not associated with the partly completed novel that Larsson was writing at the time of his death. Larsson envisioned the series eventually consisting of 10 novels, and a fourth, reportedly partly set in Northern Canada, is subject to a legal battle between Larsson’s estate and his long-time partner, Eva Gabrielsson, author of 2011’s “There Are Things I Want You to Know” About Stieg Larsson and Me.
The new novel, which Lagercrantz wrote on a computer without Internet access and hand-delivered to his publisher, once again stars computer hacker Lisbeth Salander and crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, while new characters include an American “security manager from the NSA” and “a Swedish professor of computer science from Silicon Valley.”
“Stieg Larsson was a master at creating complex stories with a lot of different plotlines and that was something I was determined to live up to,” Lagercrantz said in a statement. Describing Larsson’s writing as “down-to-earth and unaffected” and possessing “a kind of journalistic authoritativeness,” he added that he did not want to simply produce a carbon copy of Larsson’s work.
“I realized early on how idiotic it would be for me just to imitate him,” he said. “I write my own prose.”
The Millennium series, which includes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (first published in Canada in 2008), The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2010), has sold more than 2.5 million copies in Canada and almost 80 million copies around the world, and has spawned film adaptations on both sides of the Atlantic.