The Girl with Ice in Her Veins: A Lisbeth Salander Novel

by Karin Smirnoff Narrated by Simon Vance

Overview

“Lisbeth Salander is back-and maybe better than ever.” -Lee Child

“Fresh, fearless. . . . One of the great crime series of our time could not be in safer, more capable hands.” -Chris Whitaker

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ¿ Lisbeth Salander returns in this chilling new installment of the multi-million-copy bestselling Millennium series.

Sweden's far north is growing colder; even in springtime, the town of Gasskas is buried under a relentless snow. As temperatures drop, tensions rise between a global corporation shamelessly exploiting the area's natural resources and wary locals who have scores to settle. A bomb blasts apart a crucial bridge. Soon after, a young journalist is found murdered.

Meanwhile, Lisbeth is at home in Stockholm, looking to fill the void her last lover left behind. When she discovers that fellow hacker Plague has been kidnapped and taken up north, and finds her niece, Svala, on her doorstep, she has no choice but to return to Gasskas-with Mikael Blomkvist at her side. Blomkvist takes the helm at Gasskas's newspaper, and Lisbeth tries to locate Plague. But then Svala goes missing, and Lisbeth's worst fears come to haunt her. . .

Lured back to a lawless town full of predators disguised as saviors and foes disguised as friends, forced to face down their own troubling pasts and those of their loved ones, Salander and Blomkvist must untangle a history of violence before it's too late. The Girl with Ice in Her Veins is a twisty, vertiginous, hard-hitting thriller that breathes new life into Stieg Larsson's epic series and unforgettable characters.

Editorial Reviews

Femina

Criminally fast-paced.

Västerbotten-kuriren

A splash of Tolkien, two scoops of Marvel, a shattered girl’s world. . . . A gaze that meets Larsson's feminist anger but continues to dig a little deeper.

From the Publisher

Criminally fast-paced.”
—Femina

“Smirnoff’s spin on the Millennium series exposes the characters’ emotional vulnerabilities without sacrificing the series’ complexity and unflinching thrills.”
—Booklist

“This author takes the Millennium series to a new level.”
—Arbetarbladet

“A splash of Tolkien, two scoops of Marvel, a shattered girl’s world. . . . A gaze that meets Larsson's feminist anger but continues to dig a little deeper.”
—Västerbotten-kuriren

“Karin Smirnoff’s language is worth reading for its own sake.”
—Dagens Nyheter

“Well-written and exciting.”
—Dast

Kirkus Reviews

2025-07-17
Lisbeth Salander is back, and the body count is rising.

“The girl has an eye for things, the sort of intuition that strips those wolves to the bare skin. Fourteen years of experience have refined this ability to perfection.” Hacker and general mayhem agent Lisbeth Salander’s niece, a Sami teenager named Svala Hirak, has inadvertently gotten herself into a fix in a far-northern Swedish mining town, and Lisbeth is on the scene to help. At Lisbeth’s side, natch, is intrepid journalist Mikael Blomkvist, wrestling not just with evildoers but also with prostate cancer. The chief evildoer is a wheelchair-using (a sure sign of a villain in genre thrillers) tech billionaire (ditto) who’s looking to round out his portfolio with a mining claim, and he’s not at all shy of bumping off anyone who gets in his way. Svala, unfortunately, is tied up with an environmental group; coming over all Greta Thunberg, she tells a sneering interviewer, “We’re not an organization…but a loose grouping of people who want to safeguard the value of the natural world and human life.” Since our bad guy, Marcus Branco, doesn’t get around so easily, he employs a number of bad people to do his dirty work, one of whom, the Cleaner (“He is someone who is morally easy to criticize”), makes for the most effective character in Smirnoff’s rogues’ gallery. As the story unfolds, it turns out that Branco is after something that only Svala can provide; to get it, a fellow hacker must betray Lisbeth— never a good thing to do. The plot grinds along to an admittedly unexpected end, diverted frequently by the appearance of too many minor characters and too little dramatic tension. Still, Smirnoff has left room for a sequel, and one hopes it won’t be a further diminution of Stieg Larsson’s once-excellent series.

An overstuffed slog in the Salander saga.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194435982
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/02/2025
Series:	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Series , #8
Edition description:	Unabridged

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