How long should a series of books be? It’s a question that has troubled writers and publishers for decades. Even the most prolific writers can find it challenging to sustain characters across multiple books. For Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Series, the conundrum is even more complicated since his original three books have been continued by not one, but two different writers following his death.

The international success of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, both in literary and cinematic form, was always going to spark a demand for more following the original trilogy. Following Larsson, David Largercrantz added an additional three books to the canon and in 2023 Karin Smirnoff took over the writing credit and now adds this eight book, The Girl With Ice In Her Veins, to the series.

Sadly, the overwhelming question having waded through the 370 pages comes in as is it time to pull the plug on the series?

Lisabeth Salander remains one of Scandinavian crime literature’s most compelling characters. Her tenacity, rebelliousness and non-conformity are key elements of why Dragon Tattoo captured the world’s attention. Perhaps it’s the rule of diminishing returns but recent installments have somewhat diluted Salander’s role, to the detriment of the whole.

The same applies to The Girl With The Ice In Her Veins, where attention focuses more on Salander’s niece Svala. The key elements of the Millenium Series remain – our central characters battle with operating on the gray border between legal and illegal, corporate corruption played out alongside a hefty dose of violence. Smirnoff though repeats issues from The Girl in the Eagle’s Talon’s, her first foray into the Millenium series, and attempts to cram so many sub plots and characters into the work that it becomes an arduous slog for the reader.

Smirnoff also tries to cram in several important messages as sub plots. The oppression of the Sami population and the threat to their lifestyle is an important subject that is gaining increasing literary attention, but here its handled as almost a side thought – ideas thrown into the mix and then cast aside. The same goes for the environmental messaging, protestors against expansion of local mining operations are thinly drawn as terrorists with almost a lazy attention to detail.

It is perhaps in her character work that Smirnoff falls most short. With the groundwork set by Larsson and Lagercrantz, Lisabeth Salander’s character is already well defined but here we’re left with the uncomfortable thought that the ice in the veins in the title may have begun to melt. The same can be said Salander’s long-time investigative partner Mikael Blomkvist. Once at the cutting edge of investigative journalism Blomkvist here is reduced to little more than a sick shadow of himself spending large amounts of time pontificating to anyone who will listen.

Add in a wheelchair bound villain that could have stepped out of a James Bond franchise and it’s a sprawling cast of characters that are hard to engage with.

The Millenium Series has never sugar-coated life in Sweden to be some Scandic utopia and yet earlier instalments somehow managed to include a sliver of humanity, however dark and twisted that humanity was. Here the bleakness is unrelenting, the plot torturous and meandering and by the time it comes to its climatic conclusion there’s just a relief that the journey is over.

Larsson had plotted a ten-book arc for Lisabeth Salander. Here at book eight, we need to ask the uncomfortable question has The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo now run out of steam and is it time to call it a day on one of Sweden’s most iconic literary characters?

The Girl With Ice In Her Veins by Karin Smirnoff, translated by Sarah Death, is published by Maclehose Press.

Written by: Glen Pearce, Content Creator at Nordic Watchlist