Last seen variously nailing (criminal) feet to the floor and tentatively allowing journalist Mikael Blomkvist back into her life, Stieg Larsson’s superhacker Lisbeth Salander is preparing to make her fourth entrance into the literary arena – and this time, she’s trying to hack into the American National Security Agency.
The British publisher of David Lagercrantz’s heavily embargoed follow-up to the late Larsson’s three Millennium novels revealed the first details about the plot of The Girl in the Spider’s Web today. Out on 27 August, the story of a book which has been authorised by Larsson’s estate but heavily criticised by his partner Eva Gabrielsson has been a closely guarded secret until now. Swedish writer Lagercrantz wrote the novel on a computer without an internet connection and delivered his manuscript by hand, with a single copy then couriered by its Swedish publisher Norstedts to the dozens of international houses which will release it next month.
But today, MacLehose Press released what it said were “key details” in the plot of The Girl in the Spider’s Web. The novel continues the story of Salander and Blomkvist, last seen at the ending of Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, published in Swedish in 2007 and in English in 2009.
Despite the ending of Larsson’s novel, the misfit hacker Salander and the crusading journalist Blomkvist “have not been in touch for some time”, revealed MacLehose Press. The novel opens as “renowned Swedish scientist Professor Balder” contacts Blomkvist, asking him to publish his story.
And “it is a terrifying one,” said the publisher. “Säpo, Sweden’s security police, have offered him protection, but what Balder hopes for is to preserve his life’s work” – he has made “world-leading advances in artificial intelligence” – by going public.
Balder has also been working with Salander, it then emerges. The hacker has been using her old codename of Wasp, and has been attempting to crack the NSA – “a lunacy driven by vengeance, and fraught with every possible consequence”, said MacLehose.
She is also being targeted by “ruthless cyber gangsters who call themselves the Spiders”, and “the violent unscrupulousness of this criminal conspiracy will very soon bring terror to the snowbound streets of Stockholm, to the Millennium team – and to Blomkvist and Salander themselves”.
MacLehose promised that the narrative would be “adrenaline-charged, brilliantly intricate and utterly absorbing”. To date, 15m copies of Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy have been sold in the UK, and more than 80m around the world.
