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New author picks up where 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' series left off

Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist are back in the fourth installment of Stieg Larsson's 'Millennium' series, this time written by David Lagercrantz.

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
David Lagercrantz was selected by both the Larsson estate and his publisher in Sweden (Norstedts) to continue working on the Millennium series.

This Tuesday, publishers released the title and cover art of the fourth book in Stieg Larsson’s 'Millennium' series, which includes “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.”

This next installment, titled “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” will be the first book in the series not written by Larsson, who died in 2004. Instead, the novel will be penned by the Swedish writer and former crime journalist David Lagercrantz. Lagercrantz is best known for co-authoring the 2014 memoir of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a Swedish soccer player.

The previous three novels in the series track the adventures of Lisbeth Salander, a punk computer hacker, and journalist Mikael Blomkvist, as they seek to uncover and disassemble a European crime ring.

Lagercrantz is continuing their story with the blessing of Larsson’s father and brother, who chose him specifically and gave him free reign to pick up where the crime drama left off. However, Larsson’s long-time partner Eva Gabrielsson does not approve of the sequel.

According to UK publisher Christopher MacLehose, Larsson had loosely outlined 10 books for the series and MacLehose says that the author would have wanted to see his characters live on.

“I think it has all the richness of the original sequence of novels,” the editor in chief of American publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Sonny Mehta, told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s got a whole chain of American characters in it, and American settings as well.”

Lagercrantz has hinted that Silicon Valley and a character from the National Security Agency (NSA) play a pivotal role in the new installment.

“Stieg Larsson was a master at creating complex narratives,” Lagercrantz told the Wall Street Journal. “Narratives made all the more forceful because of the journalistic authority with which they were originally written. That was something that informed my approach to book four, and I’m confident Millennium readers will identify with the storylines in Spider’s Web.”

Written on a computer with no Internet access and delivered to the publisher by hand, the contents of the book are being kept under lock and key.

“The Swedish original publishers, Norstedts, have put everyone on notice that no particle of this book can be shared with anybody,” MacLehose told The Guardian. “There’ll be no review copies in any language before it’s launched on 27 August.”

“The Girl in the Spider’s Web” –  titled “Det som inte dödar oss,” “What Doesn’t Kill You,” in the original Swedish – is currently being translated into 38 different languages with George Goulding working on the English edition. The book will be released in the US on Sept. 1, 2015.

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