Dragon Tattoo's Lisbeth Salander is back as The Girl in the Spider's Web
She's back: Title and cover art revealed for book 4 of Dragon Tattoo series
The fourth instalment of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series is one step closer to our collective devouring.
The Girl in the Spider's Web will continue with Lisbeth Salander's complex and dark persona and is slated to be published in Canada Sept. 1 by Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
Millions of readers found Stieg Larsson's dark but intelligent thrillers totally addictive. The heroes, journalist Mikael Blomqvist and hacker Lisbeth Salander, tackle a long-standing murder mystery within a secretive Swedish family, sex-trafficking scandals and some downright pure personal revenge.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest have collectively sold over 2.5 million copies in Canada since their launch here in 2008 and 80 million copies have been sold around the globe.
The latest edition, shrouded in secrecy, was reportedly typed on a PC with no internet connection and hand delivered to the publisher.
Sweden's Dragon Tattoo publisher hired author David Lagercrantz to write a sequel to the wildly popular series because Larsson himself couldn't do it. He died unexpectedly in 2004, before the books were even published.
The head of publishing at Norstedts, Eva Gedin, has said previously the book will be an original work that includes nothing from the fourth book in the series that Larsson began writing but hadn't finished when he died at age 50.
"Obviously it will build on the previous books," she said in 2013 after the book's initial announcement. "Blomqvist and Salander will be included and many of the other characters."
Gedin said the decision to continue the series had been taken after careful considerations and long discussions with Larsson's father and brother, Erland and Joakim Larsson, who own the rights to his work.
Larsson's longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsson, who has been in a legal dispute with Erland and Joakim over the rights to the trilogy, has called the decision "tasteless."
Lagercrantz is the author of I am Zlatan, a biography of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the captain of Sweden's soccer team.
He has said he was really skeptical about the idea of writing a fourth book in the series at first, but that changed when he reread Larsson's novels.
"I increasingly felt that these characters, Blomqvist and Salander, deserved a longer life," he said.
"In the times we live in, where we are monitored by American authorities like the NSA, a hacker like Lisbeth Salander is needed."
Gabrielsson and Larsson were a couple for more than 30 years, but they never married. Larsson didn't leave a will, so only his brother and father inherited the rights to his works.
His bestselling series inspired a hit Swedish film trilogy starring Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace. A subsequent and acclaimed English-language movie adaptation of the first book starred Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara.
With files from The Associated Press