My guess is that it is time to retire Blomkvist and Lisbeth after this book as the quality was only a fraction of the books in the Steig Larsson franchise. Just writing the word franchise in relation to books makes my heart quiver. The characters were not the strength and depth of the originals and parts of the plot were stretched a little thin.

Blomkvist travels up to the north of Sweden for his daughter’s marriage to a man that appears to be more of a Bond villain. Extremely well-dressed, he is the mayor of the town, fingers in all the pies and determining what goes forward and what doesn’t in planning. That is until he meets Branco, a villain worthy of taking him on, who then kidnaps his son to get what he wants, which is the contract to build renewable energy plants on forested land.

Lisbeth finds herself up in the north as the only living relative of a girl whose mother has disappeared. On the trail of finding the mother, she meets up with Blomkvist and the two stories merge. Yes, there are fights, the bikers make an appearance again and the girl is a younger version of Lisbeth.

Although the story was dressed up as an eco-crime, in actual fact that was a fairly superficial element of the story. Branco could have headed up any crime gang because in fact the eco element had no part in how the plot moved on, it just framed it.

Oh, how disappointing.