Fans of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” will be getting another installment of the dark Scandinavian thriller series featuring Lisbeth Salander, the goth computer hacker.
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf has revealed the cover and title for the new novel, the fourth in the bestselling Millennium series created by the late Stieg Larsson. “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” an original work written by David Lagercrantz, will be published in the United States on Sept. 1.
The Millennium series began in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” a surprise bestseller when it was published in the United States in 2008. Larsson, a Swedish journalist and author, had died of a heart attack in 2004 at the age of 50, before his novels had been published. That thriller was followed by two other books he had already written, “The Girl Who Played with Fire” in 2009 and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” in 2010. Together the trilogy has sold more than 80 million copies worldwide, according to a spokesman for Knopf.
Lagercrantz, a journalist and thriller writer, was selected by the Larsson estate and his Swedish publisher to create new stories for protagonists Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist. The novel is not the manuscript that Larsson was writing at the time of his death.
The American cover of “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” was created by Knopf designer Peter Mendelsund, who designed the jackets of the earlier books.
Larsson’s longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsson, has criticized the decision to continue the series. In an interview, she told the AFP news agency, “They say heroes are supposed to live forever. That’s a load of crap, this is about money.”
“The Girl in the Spider’s Web” will be published in 25 countries, with a first U.S. printing of 500,000 copies.
