 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book with 24 letters in the title.
The Girl in the Eagle's Talons, by Karin Smirnoff This is the start of a new trilogy with "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" heroine Lisbeth Salander, and reporter Mikael Blomkvist, set several years after the last book, with a new set of villains. It took me some time to get into this one, because the early parts were mostly about new characters. We don't see Lisbeth until around page 70, and she doesn't get to kick anyone's butt for another hundred or so pages. The new villains have a curious mix of Nazi and green ideology: they believe the world is overpopulated, and want to get rid large portions of the population. The main villain is disabled (born with no legs), and somehow he and his followers have reconciled the Nazi part of their ideology with the fact that he's someone the Nazis would have deemed unfit to live. (Of course, fascists can rationalize just about anything in the pursuit of power.) There's a lot of casual cruelty throughtout the story, including torture and rape. There are several over-the-top coincidences, including Lisbeth and Blomkvist being in the same remote town, where she's taking temporary custody of her 13-year-old niece. And there are at least two other plot twists that involve the discovery of long-lost relatives. For once, women aren't constantly hitting on Blomkvist. Lisbeth, on the other hand, is having assorted flings with both men and women. We are once again teased with the possibility of romance between them. The main plot involves someone important to Blomkvist being kidnapped, and then everyone just sort of goes about their business. Blomkvist goes ahead with delivering a lecture on journalism, and that didn't sit right for me - I needed him and Lisbeth to drop everything for the search. The ending, of course, was action-packed and satisfying as always.
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