The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye by David Lagercrantz

Trans. from Swedish by Charles Goulding

Knopf, 368 pages, $27.95

This time around, following his commercially successful first effort, “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” Swedish author David Lagercrantz totally channeled Stieg Larsson and his famous characters. In my opinion, although I liked it, the “Spider’s Web” was missing a key Larsson ingredient: at least one unexpected and jaw-dropping scene or character revelation. Larsson could be tedious at times, but he more than made up for it in his ability to make his readers gasp. Lagercrantz is a more polished writer and he caught Larsson’s tone the first time around, but he magnified it this time.

Lisbeth Salander, the reason we readers ravenously tear into each installment, is in prison. She doesn’t seem to mind; it’s a nice opportunity to delve into higher level mathematics and physics. Like a monk in a monastery, only God is a quantum agent.

What Salander does mind is the bullying by one of her fellow prisoners, Benito — a woman who has charmingly nicknamed herself after her favorite Italian dictator. Benito’s primary target is a young and beautiful woman, Faria, a Bangladeshi whose sad story slowly is revealed. The price for peace appears to be “mediating” the conflict between Benito and Faria. Benito may be finito.

At the same time, Salander’s past weighs more heavily on her mind. If you have read the other novels, you know about her abusive and deranged father, her abused and sad mother, and her abusive and deranged twin sister. What Lagercrantz gives us this time is the space in-between. What happened to Salander after her mother died and before she began to be abused by the odious guardian she was assigned in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Who knew her back then?

Instead of just blurting out the serious questions she has about her past, Salander challenges Holger Palmgren, her kind and courteous guardian — although as an adult she no longer needs one, and Mikael Blomkvist, a magazine owner and, as it turns out, a true friend, to uncover more about some people in her past. Maybe those people were kind and naive, maybe they were Machiavellian in the cause of science or personal gain. Palmgren and Blomkvist are sent in different directions but their investigations converge in the end.

Unlike the Larsson tales in which the stories gave more page space to Blomkvist's social concerns, this one is solidly Salander’s story. If you thought Salander had been through the mill in the other books, here are tales of her youth that will make you shudder at her long-winding path of pain.

Both Larsson’s and Lagercrantz’s works always have strong moral points of view. What’s wrong is really wrong and what it takes to cure those wrongs, no matter how violent, is very right. The takeaway always is don’t mess with Salander.