THE GIRL IN THE EAGLE'S TALONS

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.