A once-great Scandinavian noir series now produces more yawns than spills and thrills.
Lisbeth Salander is back. She’s cold, lethal, and remorseless—and that’s on her good days.
“Vigilance comes as naturally to Lisbeth as eating, shitting and sleeping.” So writes Smirnoff, picking up the posthumous Stieg Larsson franchise where David Lagercrantz left off. Normally glued to a computer, Lisbeth is up in the woodsy far north of Sweden. Bad doings, naturally, are afoot, most caused by what’s surely the only thalidomide-baby villain in literary history. Using a wheelchair doesn’t keep our bad guy from dastardly deeds. For one, he’s trying to steal the Arctic out from under its rightful owners so that he can put up wind turbine farms—though, as it happens, he really has a more combustible and internationally interdicted form of energy in mind. When not occupied with Lex Luthor–worthy schemes, our villain has a penchant for kidnapping youngsters, some to kill, some to rape, some to hold hostage. Lisbeth’s on the case for a couple of reasons, not least connecting with a niece, daughter of the brother she snuffed a few books back. (“Did you kill him?” asks the young niece. “In a way,” Lisbeth answers.) Another is to help intrepid Larsson stand-in Mikael Blomkvist, who's at loose ends since his magazine Millennium folded. His sister and brother-in-law implicated by accident and by design in all these malevolent happenings, Blomkvist heads north to dig into the story, one punctuated by neo-Nazis, bikers, drug smugglers, and other such quotidian villains. Things turn ugly fast and stay that way; only the name-checked Greta Thunberg, it seems, has much chance of surviving once the hand grenades start flying. One decidedly bad but more mobile character memorably tosses the corpses of his victims out to be cleaned by sea eagles. One wonders whether the publishers aren’t doing the same thing, gnawing every last ounce of Larsson’s original to the bone.
A once-great Scandinavian noir series now produces more yawns than spills and thrills.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9780593536698
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.
Hung out to dry by the elders who betrayed them, a squad of pregnant teens fights back with old magic.
Hendrix has a flair for applying inventive hooks to horror, and this book has a good one, chock-full with shades of V.C. Andrews, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Foxfire, to name a few. Our narrator, Neva Craven, is 15 and pregnant, a fate worse than death in the American South circa 1970. She’s taken by force to Wellwood House in Florida, a secretive home for unwed mothers where she’s given the name Fern. She’ll have the baby secretly and give it up for adoption, whether she likes it or not. Under the thumb of the house’s cruel mistress, Miss Wellwood, and complicit Dr. Vincent, Neva forges cautious alliance with her fellow captives—a new friend, Zinnia; budding revolutionary Rose; and young Holly, raped and impregnated by the very family minister slated to adopt her child. All seems lost until the arrival of a mysterious bookmobile and its librarian, Miss Parcae, who gives the girls an actual book of spells titled How To Be a Groovy Witch. There’s glee in seeing the powerless granted some well-deserved payback, but Hendrix never forgets his sweet spot, lacing the story with body horror and unspeakable cruelties that threaten to overwhelm every little victory. In truth, it’s not the paranormal elements that make this blast from the past so terrifying—although one character evolves into a suitably scary antagonist near the end—but the unspeakable, everyday atrocities leveled at children like these. As the girls lose their babies one by one, they soon devote themselves to secreting away Holly and her child. They get some help late in the game but for the most part they’re on their own, trapped between forces of darkness and society’s merciless judgement.
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593548981
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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