We’ve got the deets on the return of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’
It’s been ten years since readers were last introduced to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — hacker and crime-solver Lisbeth Salander — but now she’s back in a brand-new mystery. While the series was first published in Sweden before being translated for readers worldwide, it was actually published posthumously — the trilogy’s creator, Stieg Larsson, died of a heart attack in 2004.
Larsson called on his experience as a crime reporter to create Lisbeth’s adventures, which frequently led to her teaming up with journalist Mikael Blomkvist, to investigate violent offenses and conspiracies. Dragon Tattoo was quickly followed up by two sequels — The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest — not to mention a Swedish-language film version of the trilogy and an English-language film adaptation of the first book.
Now, another former crime reporter plans to take up the mantle to continue the series where Larsson left off. David Lagercrantz, who has the blessing of both the Larsson estate and his publisher, has written a fourth book in the Millennium series. The Girl in the Spider’s Web, which is slated for publication on September 1, 2015.
However, not everyone is voicing approval about this new addition to the series. Larsson’s partner, Eva Gabrielsson, has expressed her criticism against anyone continuing the series — and according to reports, does not believe that Larsson even had a plan to write beyond the original trilogy of books when he first started writing.
David Lagercrantz isn’t the first writer to continue a series after a writer’s passing, and it seems as though many of the details surrounding The Girl in the Spider’s Web are still shrouded in mystery. He wrote the original manuscript on a computer with no connection to the Internet, and was careful to deliver it to his publishers in hand, according to The Guardian.
The new cover image was also released with news of the new title — and the cool thing is that the U.S. edition was actually designed by the same artist responsible for the cover art for the original series. Based on what we know so far — which isn’t much yet, truth be told — we can’t deny that we’re a little excited for this new Lisbeth Salander story. We’ll be counting down the days until September.
