The Girl Who Lived Twice

Two sisters, mirror opposites, have been on a collision course for years and now it comes to a head on either side of an investigation into an ill-fated Everest expedition. The Girl Who Lived Twice is the sixth book of the Millennium series and third by David Lagercrantz, sees the final confrontation between Lisbeth and Camilla after finding out the truth behind an incident on Mount Everest.

Lisbeth Salander attempts to kill her sister Camilla in Moscow, but can’t pull the trigger and goes to Copenhagen and gets into a relationship with a domestically abused woman while spying on her sister and helping in-a-slump Mikael Blomkvist investigate the death of a homeless man. Blomkvist’s investigation happens when a coroner calls him show more because the dead man has his phone number and Mikael learns the man accosted a female journalist spouting about the Swedish Defense Minister who is enduring a disinformation campaign from Russia. The homeless man turns out to be a Sherpa who was apart of an ill-fated expedition up Mount Everest that caught global attention because of the death of a socialite who was on it, but it turned out so was the Defense Minister before his political career. It turns out the Minister’s friend was working for the Russian mob and essentially killed the socialite for her American billionaire husband who is also connected with the mob and convinced the Sherpa to leave her and help the Minister off the mountain instead. The Sherpa feels guilty and after the death of his wife loses his mind and wants to tell the truth, but the Minister is convinced to get him out of Nepal to a asylum in Sweden but he later escapes and the Minister’s corrupt friend killed him then started blackmailing him resulting in him almost committing suicide but Blomkvist saves him. While Blomkvist is going to interview the Minister, he is abducted by Camilla and her associates to be tortured and get Lisbeth to them. Lisbeth now in Sweden, tracks them down, and confronts her sister who attempts to set Lisbeth on fire only to light herself up instead and kills herself because she is no longer beautiful. The Minister’s corrupt friend is arrested, Mikael’s new lover writes the article about the truth of the ill-fated expedition, and he learns of Lisbeth’s “help” at his stalled article.

While Lisbeth and Mikael are “featured” they aren’t the heart of the book, that goes to the characters created by Lagercrantz that are connected with the main plot of the mysterious Sherpa and an ill-fated Mount Everest expedition he was apart of along with the future Swedish Defense Minister and his friend as well the socialite that died on it. Throughout Lagercrantz’s books in the series, Lisbeth has been sidelined and Mikael has been “used” more but only for original characters to have the spotlight. If the Mount Everest plot had been a book not connected to the Millennium series, I might have really enjoyed it more. But this series is supposed to be about Lisbeth Salander and throughout the last three book it has not been. The “climactic” confrontation between Lisbeth and Camilla at the end, is so disappointing that the build up over the previous books was a waste as well. Frankly Lagercrantz’s Lisbeth is a pale imitation of Larrson’s Lisbeth thus making this and the previous two books a waste.

The Girl Who Lived Twice might be billed a Lisbeth Salander novel, but in fact she’s just a name so David Lagercrantz can sell books. show less

I'm so sad this is the last book in the series but I liked (no, loved!) the way it ended -- with the possibility that another author (or the same author) could pick it up and continue it. I also love that Lisbeth has finally dealt with her sister and she can put her past behind her.

I kind pretty much hated the Lisbeth & "Evil Twin" storyline, much preferring the Mikael storylines, which were, more or less, running the storyline & series. What is uncovered in this last novel, however, really made me sympathize with both Lisbeth and Camilla -- it was just what that storyline needed! Wow!

Adrianne

Honestly, this series has not disappointed me. There's nonstop action, complex storylines threaded together, and badass characters. Lisbeth Salander is not the sole focus of this novel, as with the other books, she shares the spotlight pretty equally with her friend, the famed journalist, Mikael Blomkvist. Lisbeth has been focused on taking out her family and ridding the world of their evil presence, she's located her sister in Russia and nothing is going to stop her from finally ending it all. Blomkvist on the other hand is wrapped up in a little mystery, that at first, doesn't even seem worth his time investigating. A homeless man found dead on the streets with no identity, the police can't identify him using dental fingerprints, or show more DA so Mikael is trying to reach Lisbeth to help him identify the man. The trouble is, when she doesn't want to be found, she won't be. Soon enough their separate "tasks" end up crossing wires and they are in each other's business whether or not they want to be. Intriguing and unique, although I could have gone with a more drawn out ending. It seemed to wrap up so quickly! I wonder what they'll get into next! show less

I "discovered" Stieg Larsson's Millennium series with the original Swedish movies that came out, oh, a number of years ago. Loved the movies, all three of them, so I went out and got the books. Really enjoyed those as well, although for my tastes Larsson's writing seemed like it could have done with some editing. The books, while fun, seemed to meander. I wondered if, because they were published posthumously, his estate and/or the editors didn't know how to edit them down to neater, cleaner stories. Just speculation.

When I heard someone else had been conscripted to write more in the series, I absolutely wasn't interested in reading them. Sacrilege, I thought. But, by and by, I wound up giving the first book by this new writer, David show more Lagercrantz* a try. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that he kept the spirit of the characters and the stories alive (and well!) while trimming down Larsson's stylistically bloated prose into something more concise. I sized him up as the better writer, knowing the comparison was completely unfair. But his book read tighter, to me at least.

I would have said the same about his second novel in this series.

This third one let me down quite a bit. I'll still give it 3 out of 5 stars, but I didn't think this one did the series justice. The overly complicated sub-plot of the people on Mr Everest was just cumbersome. My god, so many characters were involved in that. Hard to keep up with all of them. And in the end, that was about the third most interesting sub-plot in the whole novel. Scratch that. The woman who moved into Lisbeth's old apartment who we only see for a dozen pages or so was more interesting. I just didn't care about the Everest story-line. It did nothing to propel our main protagonists (Lisbeth and Mikael) forward in the grand scheme.

So while Mikael spends over half the novel investigating the death of a sherpa who ended up dead in the streets of Stockholm (yeah, you read that right) Lisbeth spends her lesser portion of the book doing very little. And that's what's really missing here. In Lagercrantz's last two books, Lisbeth was the center of attention. Why he decided to push her to the back burner this time is beyond me. It's written right there on the cover: "A Lisbeth Salander novel." But no, it was "A Dead Sherpa" story, which probably would have been a pretty good story if it never included Lisbeth and Mikael at all.

Almost as if—and I continue to speculate, wildly in fact, but this feels right—Lagercrantz was under contract to write a third book, was running out of ideas, and merged in an idea he had for a completely separate novel in order to satisfy the terms of his arrangement. He's said that he was only going to write three and after this he was going to move onto something else. My guess is he had a solid two-and-a-half books in him and struggled to piece together the rest. Or maybe he just ran out of Salander Steam.

* Good lord, I thought to myself, did they simply hire him because his surname would put him alphabetically right next to Larsson on the book shelves? I can only speculate, but that certainly didn't hurt sales. show less

David Lagercrantz’s The Girl Who Lived Twice picks up shortly after the events of his previous novel, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye, with Lisbeth Salander tracking her sister Camilla in Russia. Meanwhile, Mikael Blomkvist feels distracted while writing a story about Russian cyber trolls and finds his interest piqued when a medical examiner seeks his help discovering the identity of a deceased homeless man. Lisbeth finds that, even after her sister attempted to kill her, she cannot bring herself to kill her sister, so she helps Blomkvist as a side project. Blomkvist discovers that the dead homeless man is connected to an Everest expedition involving several high-ranking members of government as well as the Russian intelligence show more service. As he and Salander pursue independent leads, they find their worked dogged by Camilla’s agents, who have their own connection to Russian intelligence.

While Lagercrantz had previously spent a great amount of time adding his own material to Lisbeth’s past, here he focuses only on what both he and Stieg Larsson previously wrote. His focus on Russian intelligence and cyber trolls offers particularly timely commentary. Though Lagercrantz still doesn’t quite match Larsson’s style, he ably balances several story threads and offers a satisfying resolution to the events he set in motion in The Girl in the Spider's Web. In my opinion, this is the strongest of Lagercrantz’s three Millennium series novels. show less

Every time I pick up one of these books by a dead author I really admired, continued by Mr. Lagercrantz, I feel a deep fear, an ill-boding, as if I'm really going to regret it.

And yet, when I crack open the book, I'm always pleasantly surprised. Is it because I love the characters from the originals so much that I just don't care? Maybe.

Is it because I actually have fun with the new plots? Maybe.

Is it because I'm still having fun at all, that despite all this trepidation, I still look forward to getting the book and reading it anyway, that I am plainly ENJOYING MYSELF, that I keep coming back?

Maybe.

Or maybe it's just the Sherpa murder.

No. It has to be more than murdered Sherpas.

Honestly.

This trilogy is not up to the original one written by Stieg Larsson of course but it seems that to the last book the write became familiar and comfortable with it and produced a quite good story. My only criticism is (apart from the bit less than perfect hungarian translation) that it`s basically nothing else than a `generic` scandinavian crime story with some familiar characters with in. Lisbeth`s story is much less interesting and more boring compared to the other one.