The Girl Who Lived Twice
Millennium, Book #6
By David Lagercrantz
ISBN13: 9780857056368
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Omar
Summary
“What will you do now?”
“I shall be the hunter and not the hunted”
The girl with the dragon tattoo is finally ready to confront her nemesis, the only woman who is evidently and in many ways her match. Salander will not wait to be hunted. When she strikes it will be a double blow: vengeance for recent atrocities, and the settling of lifelong scores.
For months now Salander has been closing in on her target. She has moved from Stockholm, her hair is newly styled, her piercings are gone. She could pass for any other businesswoman. But not all businesswomen have a Beretta Cheetah beneath their jacket. They do not wield the lethal power of a hacker’s genius. They do not carry scars and tattoos to remind them that they have survived the unsurvivable.
The new episode in David Lagercrantz’s acclaimed, internationally bestselling continuation of Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo series is a thrilling ride that scales the heights of Everest and plunges the depths of Russian troll factories. It begins with the discovery of Mikael Blomkvist’s number at Millennium magazine in the pocket of an unidentified homeless man who died with the name of a government minister on his lips.
Blomkvist, at extreme risk to himself, tracks down his old friend and will protect her as far as he can. But he is powerless to crush her enemies on his own.
And for Lisbeth Salander, the personal is always political – and deadly.
Review
The Girl Who Lived Twice starts with a beggar who nobody knows wandering around a park drinking moonshine someone gave him. Afterwards, he decides to rest under a tree. In the morning, he is dead and is later found at the end of a social event. At first, nobody cares about the beggar and thinks of him as another homeless man, but a coroner takes interest in his case, noticing that his physical is very odd compared to other dead homeless people. The strangest thing is that the beggar had Mikael Blomkvist’s phone number in his pocket.
That same night in Russia we find Lisbeth Salander leaving the hotel room where she had been hidden while planning her final strike against her sister Camila. Lisbeth knows where Camila is going to be that night, she has made all her preparation and she is ready. But when the time comes to pull the trigger and end the last evil of her family, she can’t do it. Lisbeth fails and has to run now that Camila has the upper hand and is hunting her.
Two different stories start but intertwined as Mikael asks for Lisbeth’s help and Camila goes against those that Lisbeth loves once she cannot find her. Time is running out for Lisbeth to finish her revenge, and for Mikael to find out the identity of the beggar who might have been murdered.
I liked The Girl Who Lived Twice. I have been a great fan of the Millennium series and the last two installments by author David Lagercrantz have been a great read. I loved Lisbeth Mikael, each one of them is in different places of their lives but still dark places that are hurting them. For Lisbeth, she is hunting her sister and seems to have remembered her childhood and is looking at Camila’s choices from a different point of view. Mikael is bored, he has lost interest in the stories that he is writing and feels left behind by technology and new journalists. This time they had different personalities and l liked them.
In the previous books in the series, we have the POV of many characters and learn information beforehand that the main characters learn later on, but these secondary characters have become fan favorites and it’s so interesting to get to know them. In this story, the history of the Beggar, whose name we later learn to be Nima Rita, was one of my favorite characters in this book. He has a tragic but rich history, and he was a good anchor to combine the two storylines and shake up the other characters.
The Girl Who Lived Twice had many great scenes, among my favorite where Minister Forsell was trying to drown himself and what was going through his mind, and Lisbeth’s attack at the restaurant and Camila. We also get to see Lisbeth put to use the knowledge about genetics that she learned in the previous book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. It was nice to see an homage to the previous books and seeing Lisbeth go back to her past researched topics.
In the whole series, we have always seen Mikael take a leap and head straight into danger for a news story, the first time got him discredited among his peers and later on, he was captured by a man that hated women, but in this story, he got burned. He’s been permanently scarred for life, and all because he followed a stranger for a lead.
We met Camila in the previous books, she had made it clear that she wants Lisbeth dead, and she wants to take over their father’s crime syndicate. While I liked her first appearance, this time her character seems to be overshadowed by other characters in the series and her own team. She is still the villain and Lisbeth’s enemy, but I was hoping for more evil acts from her.
In the end, I liked The Girl Who Lived Twice.
If you are a fan of the Millennium series and of the work of David Lagercrantz, then I recommend The Girl Who Lived Twice. In this story, all paths lead back to a monster that ruined many lives, but this one starts with a man who lost his honor sipping his last drink.
