The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz continues Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series which includes The Girl with an assortment: with the Dragon Tattoo, Who Played with Fire, Who Kicked the Hornet’s nest. Larsson had plans for more books but was killed and Lagercrantz is the person who was chosen to write them.

This is a book about:

• a father, his self-learning AI and his autistic son
• a journalist who hasn’t written a good story in awhile, his recently purchased employer and his latest investigation
• A daughter, Lisbeth, her sister, Camilla and their abusive father, Zalenchenko

The Heroes of this story are Lisbeth who is  haunted by her father’s abuse of her mother, Michael Blomkvist whose last greatest scoop to date was awhile ago, and August, who cannot speak. Each person journeys to a new place by the end of the book.

As a hero, Lisbeth is the most relatable. She has amazing hacker skills but eats poorly, dresses gothically and has limited social skills.

The issues raised in this book are not new:

• the ability to hack into exclusive data
• the possibility of creating an AI that learns and so becomes greater than its creator
• corporate espionage and the theft of trade secrets by the very organizations that are supposed to protect them
• the abuse of women and children and ineffective ways of making it stop
• the notion of safety

But the exploration of them is riveting and rooting for Lisbeth, Michael and August was fun.