The Girl Who Lived Twice is the sixth book in the Millennium saga, originally started by Stieg Larsson and continued by David Lagercrantz. This was the last book by Lagercrantz.
In some ways this book picks up where the last one left off, with Lisbeth Salander looking to find her twin sister, Camilla, who is the head of an international crime syndicate. Mikael Blomkvist is once again in a creative slump because nothing interesting is happening – until a man turns up dead under suspicious circumstances with Blomkvist’s phone number in his pocket.
With Salander’s help, as well as another the help of another journalist named Catrin Lindas, Blomkvist begins to unravel the tangled nest of wires that connects an Everest guide to the Swedish Minister of Defense, and Salander continues to chase her sister, first to Russia and then back to Sweden, ultimately cornering Camilla when Camilla goes after Blomkvist.
I can’t say I didn’t enjoy this book – it was decent enough and I liked it. Salander and Blomkvist are still a dynamic pair and Salander is still fascinating, but the stories themselves are becoming less compelling with time. I loved The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo when I first read it back in 2012(ish). Since then, the stories have gone downhill. I couldn’t say why. There was less violence in this book than the previous couple, but that is not a sticking point for me. I disliked how gory the books had become. Maybe I just don’t like Lagercrantz’s stories as much as Larsson’s. Either way, when I read/listened to this book, I was pretty glad that this was the end of the series. At the time, it was the end of the series.
But the publishing company has contracted another trilogy with Swedish writer Karin Smirnoff. The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons will be released in the English translation on August 29, 2023. I am, of course, going to read/listen to it. Hopefully, Smirnoff will be able to capture some of Larsson’s original magic.
Category Archives: suspense / thriller
The Girl Who Lived Twice
In the House in the Dark of the Woods
I read Laird Hunt’s In the House in the Dark of the Woods in 2020 and I bought it because it was described as a horrifying psychological thriller and…I guess that’s true? I wasn’t horrified. It was a psychological thriller. I’m going to go ahead and say spoilers because the book only came out in 2018, but…eh.
I had a lot of problems with this book. First of all, it was extremely confusing. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I’m pretty bright. I was never a kid who had any trouble with “book learning” and if I’m really focused on something I’m interested in, I pick it up pretty quickly. I had to reread passages in this book over and over and over again to make sure I understood them correctly. I’ve read confusing books before, but this one was just loaded with stuff that left me scratching my head upon first reading.
It was even difficult to determine the setting at first, although that was one of the easier parts to figure out. The story is set in colonial New England, and basically, a woman goes berry picking in the woods and gets lost. She finds herself in the company of three other women – Captain Jane, Granny Someone, and Eliza, to whose cottage she keeps returning.
It also becomes clear throughout the book that the narrator, who is called Goody by the women she meets, is being beaten by her husband and her son is emotionally distant from her. It also becomes clear that she is trapped in a cycle of abuse that never ends. All the characters are. Fairy-folk are stand ins for Native Americans. Hope – personified by a golden blonde girl – comes and goes. The characters are trapped in some kind of surrealist game where they willingly abuse other people by someone who controls them.
The whole thing is imagery of fairy tales and folklore and even the Bible, but to me the book fell flat. Strangeness can be fun, but after awhile it gets tiring. If I have to work that hard just to figure out what’s going on, I can’t enjoy the story. And I don’t love the whole ‘abuse’ thing as an allegory or a metaphor or whatever it was. People seem really split on this book, with lots of people singing its praises and lots of others more in line with my way of thinking.
I’m sure In the House in the Dark of the Woods is a book for someone, but it’s not a book for me.
The Outsider
I was always going to read/listen to The Outsider. It was released in 2018, and I listened to it in 2020 during Covid, of course, but I had been on the waiting list at the library for much longer – I think three or four months. Anyway, I was always going to read The Outsider because Stephen King wrote the novel around Holly Gibney, probably my favorite of his female characters to date, and maybe favorite overall.
Holly is hired when what seems to be an open and shut case begins to get out of control. The raped and mutilated body of Frankie Peterson is found, and all signs point to Terry Maitland, a teacher and local Little League coach. Maitland claims innocence, as he was at a conference with other teachers at the time of the murder, but they find his fingerprints and DNA at the crime scene – however, they also find video of him and his fingerprints at the site of the conference, with the other teachers confirming his nearly constant presence.
Maitland is eventually murdered by Ollie Peterson, Frankie’s brother, who blames Maitland for his brother’s death and his mother’s resulting fatal heart attack. Ollie is shot and killed by police. Ralph Anderson, who ordered the public arrest of Maitland and blamed for the ensuing publicity circus, is put on leave. With his dying breaths, Maitland continues to insist he’s innocent.
Holly, who has become a private investigator since we last saw her in End of Watch, takes the case when she’s approached by the investigator hired by Maitland’s attorney. Things proceed from there, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes quote driving the story: Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. The premise of the story is that a guy was in two places at once, and Holly knows that cannot be the case.
I enjoyed this book a lot although I saw some mixed reviews of it when I googled it briefly to refresh myself of some of the character names (I couldn’t remember Terry’s last name to save my life three years later). Once again, Stephen King sucked me into a story *so* fast. It took one chapter or less. His gift for this, at least in my case, is something I can only dream of.
I love that Holly has opened a detective agency. I love Holly. She is just as adorably quirky in this book and I found her just as endearing.
Of note: HBO made this novel into a show and I hated it because they ruined Holly. I remember seeing a lot of criticism at the time that people who disliked the TV version of Holly was because she was black and eyeroll. It wasn’t that she was black. It was that they took away all her charming quirks and just left her as someone who was socially awkward. I love that she’s a movie buff and that she bites her nails obsessively and that she’s very sweet and loyal once you get to know her. None of what made her wonderful came through in the adaptation. I was super glad when HBO decided not to pick up season 02.
Better Holly news! Stephen King is publishing another novel focused around Holly later this year, and I’m so excited that I’m tempted to preorder it.
House
House is a very disappointing supernatural/horror story by Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker.
The premise is a really good one: a couple experiencing marital difficulties, on a road trip through the middle of nowhere in Alabama, find themselves stranded on the side of the road with their tires blown out. They find a big Victorian house not far away and are let in by the owners, where another couple, also experiencing car trouble, stay. Unfortunately, the owners and guests are locked in by a mysterious psychopath named White, who issues an ultimatum: they’ll be allowed to leave if one of the group is dead by dawn. If not, White will kill all of them. Or something like that.
Sounds promising, but it didn’t turn out like I had hoped.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know going in that Peretti and Dekker were writers of Christian fiction. There was a lot of people trusting in God and in each other and rediscovering their love to save themselves and all that boring nonsense. Maybe it could have been more successful with a lighter touch, but the “lessons” were really heavy handed. Plus, the ending didn’t entirely make sense, and the whole mystery of who White is was never solved. I googled later, and apparently this was supposed to take place in the same universe as some of their other stories, where I guess you get to learn more about the antagonist (who became, immediately, the most interesting part of the story and was never elaborated on).
All in all, it wasn’t the worst book I ever picked up, but I certainly am in no rush to read more stories by these guys. Thanks but no thanks, boring Christian novelists.
Apparently this bizarre and disappointing book was also made into a film for some reason. I read the synopsis of the film. It looks even worse than the book. Wild.
The Monstrumologist
Guys. The Monstrumologist was a YA book by Rick Yancey.
I can’t believe they let people under 14 read this book. As a 30 year old, this book scared the shit out of me, and I’m no stranger to horror books.
The story follows Will Henry, the orphaned assistant of Dr. Pellinore Warthrop, who specializes in the study of monsters. Warthrop also employed Will’s father, James. It is revealed that Will’s father had some kind of parasite in him that Will also has, that Warthrop helped him manage. The novel takes place in the 1880s in an alternate version of New England – clearly there are monsters in this America. Think Supernatural but without the humor and brotherly bond to make you feel better about things.
Will and Warthrop eventually end up hunting a pack of Anthropophagi. Anthropophagi are cannibal monsters (as it turns out they were imported by Warthrop’s father, also a Monstrumologist) decades previously. In order to stop the Anthropophagi, Warthrop enlists the help of Jack Kearns, who is fantastic at killing things. As the story goes on, it becomes clear that Kearns is a sociopath but is very good at his job, and this is typically why he is tolerated by Warthrop, although the two men are similar in certain ways.
I got through this story as an audiobook, and maybe that was part of the reason the effect was so chilling. Everything about this story freaked me out – the claustrophobic atmosphere of Warthrop and Will’s house and lives, the choice of monster, the fate of the sea captain Warthrop and Will visit, the location of the Anthropophagi den, Kearns identity…the whole thing combined into one of the most terrifying books I ever read.
It freaked me out so much that I’ve yet to finish the series, and I’m usually committed to a series if I liked the first book. I did like it. It did it’s job, and scared the shit out of me. I read the general synopsis of the series and I just know the whole thing is going to get worse. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it. It just bothered me too much.
If I’d read this at a kid I’d have had nightmares for months. I had a couple of nightmares as a 30 year old.
If you want to read a real horror book, this is it. It doesn’t matter that it’s YA. I don’t know if other people found it as scary as I did, but to me, this book was scary AF.
The Historian
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova may have been my favorite book of 2018 for its detail, complexity, and the blending of the history and folklore of Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler) and his fictional counterpart, Count Dracula.
It kicked off a series of Dracula books for me in 2018. Dracula is a fascinating legend to begin with, and as I said previously, I did a lot of “scary” in 2018. The Historian isn’t a typical “horror” story but there are a lot of elements of it, and it’s definitely a suspenseful book. I’d put it mostly under historical fiction, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.
The Historian is a story within a story. It’s actually a story within a story within a story, but it begins to get confusing if you think about it too hard, and it really wasn’t a confusing book. Don’t get me wrong – it was long and quite dense. I did the audiobook version and it was 24 hours? 26? It was long. But it wasn’t confusing.
The unnamed narrator, in Amsterdam in the 1970s, finds a vellum book with a woodcut of a dragon associated with Dracula, and she asks her father, Paul, about it. He explains that he found it in his study carrel during his time as a graduate student in the 1950s. He took it to his mentor/advisor, Professor Bartholomew Rossi, and discovered Rossi had also found one when he was a graduate student in the 1930s. Rossi researches Vlad Tepes, the Dracula myth, and these mysterious books. Rossi travels as far as Istanbul, but unexplained circumstances and characters send him back to his graduate work at the university and Rossi, in the 1950s, informs Paul that he believes that Dracula is, somehow, still alive. After meeting with Paul, Rossi disappears.
There are smears of blood on Rossi’s desk and on the ceiling, but other than that, everything is in place. The police suspect run of the mill foul play, but Paul is certain that something involved in research into the Dracula legend is to blame for his disappearance.
The majority of the book follows the 1950s story, with cuts in and out to the 1930s and 1970s storylines, with all three of the main characters – the narrator, Paul, and Rossi – researching the Dracula myth in Europe and eventually converging later in the book.
As I said, the blending of history and folklore in this story made it one of my favorites of 2018. There’s tons of cool info about Vlad Tepes, the Dracula legend, and Europe in general. I loved the story surrounding the narrator, Paul, and Rossi as well as the ambiguous ending.
The Historian was one of those books that made me sad it was over, like it should have kept going, like there was even more story that could have been told. It was so good that I jumped on Kostova’s The Swan Thieves, which ended up being one of the books I returned early and didn’t finish last year. I don’t know if Kostova is a one hit wonder, but if she is, I very much enjoyed and highly recommend this one hit. If you enjoy history and folklore like I do, I think you’ll like The Historian as well.
The Darkest Evening of the Year
This was my first Dean Koontz book, and honestly, I borrowed it because it featured golden retrievers.
Our heroine, Amy, runs a rescue group for abandoned/abused golden retrievers. Her dedication to saving abused animals can be reckless. She has a love interest who she can’t fully commit to, and when she adopts Nicki, a series of strange incidents start happening that indicate she’s being stalked.
Ok, so I don’t remember that much of this book. Honestly? It wasn’t that good. What I do remember is the impression that golden retrievers are awesome (I now have one and he is super awesome, but he is a handful), this wasn’t the horror story I thought I was getting, and miracles are a cop out way to end a book.
This was marketed to me as a horror story but it seemed more supernatural/suspense because of the whole dogs are angels and a higher power is at play aspect of it. Like I said, miracles are a crappy way to end a book.
I know that Koontz wrote this book because of HIS golden retriever. IIRC, he said to the dog that she was an angel sent from Heaven, and that the dog seemed to recognize that he said this.
I believe it. Totally legit. Dogs ARE angels sent from Heaven.
This book’s biggest redeeming qualities are the golden retrievers. I love them, they are wonderful, and they are without a doubt special angels. The miracles and lack of interesting plot weren’t my favorite aspects. Buuuut golden retrievers. The book gets a pass.
The Apartment
The Apartment by the S.L. Grey (which I think is actually a pen name for two people, IIRC) was disappointing. Don’t get me wrong, the premise sounds good. From Amazon:
Mark and Steph have a relatively happy family with their young daughter in sunny Cape Town until one day when armed men in balaclavas break in to their home. Left traumatized but physically unharmed, Mark and Steph are unable to return to normal and live in constant fear. When a friend suggests a restorative vacation abroad via a popular house swapping website, it sounds like the perfect plan. They find a genial, artistic couple with a charming apartment in Paris who would love to come to Cape Town. Mark and Steph can’t resist the idyllic, light-strewn pictures, and the promise of a romantic getaway. But once they arrive in Paris, they quickly realize that nothing is as advertised. When their perfect holiday takes a violent turn, the cracks in their marriage grow ever wider and dark secrets from Mark’s past begin to emerge.
Not as good as it sounds.
First, my entertainment curse continued: I figured out where the book was going pretty early on. I didn’t know exactly how it would get there, but it did. I won’t offer many spoilers here, in case you want to read the story. I didn’t find the ending great either. A haunting that travels? Please.
Second, I found the horror aspect of this story underdeveloped. There was not a lot of horror here. In fact, the book seemed a little bit confused about whether it wanted to be a ghost story or a psychological thriller. The mix made it fail a bit at both. It had some suspenseful moments, but overall…meh.
Third, I found Mark and Steph annoying, Mark infinitely more so. Steph was neurotic and paranoid and scared for her daughter, which is plenty annoying, but Mark just…ugh just brooding and whining and self-indulgent.
I will say there are literary references to Daphne du Maurier here. I don’t remember what they were at this point, but I remember thinking that I really enjoyed that aspect of it.
I won’t say that The Apartment is a complete waste of time, but I wouldn’t recommend it, either.
Origin
Robert Langdon returns in another over the top, trashy thriller that I, of course, devoured voraciously in a frenzy of excited joy.
Dan Brown writes my favorite far fetched works featuring a self-inserted nerd, and he didn’t disappoint in Origin!
Edmond Kirsch, Langdon’s former student, now billionaire businessman, is giving a presentation to an audience about the future of the human race (he’s made a revolutionary discovery) when he’s murdered in front of everyone. The mystery of who ordered the murder and why unravels as Langdon, his new acquaintance Ambra, and Winston – Kirsch’s version of Tony Stark’s Jarvis – rush to solve the murder and find out what Kirsch’s big discovery was.
I really liked the ending to this one, guys.
As usual, the novel was set in Europe and I am still dying to go to all of Europe, so this book continued that tradition. One of the quests it added to my list was Sagrada Familia in Spain. It looks so cool and so beautiful!
Anyway, I liked Origin. I like Robert Langdon, basically because he is a smart nerd who solves mysteries with his deep ocean of knowledge about stuff. I know that there are three films based on these novels starring Tom Hanks, but can I tell you that I pictured Robert Langdon like Tom Hanks long before Hollywood did? True story.
I don’t follow Dan Brown obsessively and I don’t know if they’re done with the movies, but as always, I was sent to Europe with a host I like for a thrilling ride. Worth it!
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye
The latest book in the Lisbeth Salander series is the second by David Lagercrantz and was not my favorite. My favorite remains the first story, but I’m starting to worry that we’re going to see a sharp drop in quality the farther out we get from Stieg Larsson’s death.
We do learn some interesting information about Lisbeth’s past, and we do watch her (from prison for her activities in the previous book) and Mikael Blomkvist solve a mystery and a crime.
There are basically two stories going on. One is about Lisbeth and the system she was brought up in after her abuse. This involves a complex social project called “The Registry” which sounded super sketchy and had something to do with separating gifted twins. Lisbeth and Blomkvist figure out that a wealthy businessman Leo Manneheimer is not actually Leo Manheimmer and the story that entails.
The other story is about a prisoner Lisbeth is trying to protect from another violent prisoner. Lisbeth is convinced the prisoner she is protecting doesn’t belong in prison, and there’s a mystery being solved there as well.
It was entertaining enough. It just wasn’t as good the previous installments.
The pacing was off, compared to previous novels, and Salander wasn’t actually in a lot of the book. Plus she was in prison a lot of the time. Langercrantz spent a lot of time on characters he created for the book, which I guess is ok, but not really why I read them.
I hope the next installment is better.
words in scarlet ink 