Review: The Girl in the Spider's Web

The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Read this in German translation, as it would be a translation for me anyways, not understanding the language in which it was originally written.
Price was rather high (Eur 18,99 for the eBook, due to our German law Buchpreisbindung it costs the same in all shops), so I chose not buy it. Might buy it, if the price sinks (probably in a few months or a year, then a paperback is published).

Mostly this is in the same style as the previous Millenium books from the late Stieg Larsson:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.
As with these previous books, a very good mixture of action and recherché. The science and computer scenes are very well done, just the right amount of information and real theories and no faults I could detect, everything feasible and for me very believable, down to the elliptical curves.
Although I think R.A.T. could have been explained once (Remote Access Tool, think VNC or TeamViewer), I heard the term for the first time a few months ago when watching "CSI Cyber", not sure how well known that term is. A list, maybe with links, of these words as something to look up in the book or on the internet would have been nice, also for "further reading" or source-material.
For some reason these 4 Millenium books are so far the only books, where the computer-hacking is described both correct and not too deep as to deliver a blue-print for would-be hackers, also without mistakes or too much made up technobabble. You get the feeling, the writer knows how to hack.
Often, in other books, I get the feeling the writer was told, how it works, but did not understand it - in fore- or afterwords this gets confirmed, some writers are honest enough to say so.
Really like the style, although some little scenes stumble a bit, but if memory serves me right, that was also the case in the Stieg Larsson-books.

It has been some time, since I read the first three books back2back, I could remember some stuff, so I am not entirely sure, this can be safely read as a standalone. As it is, I would recommend it to Stieg Larsson Fans anyway, so you have to decide for your self. It helps the background to read the other books - the second and third read like one big book, the second ending on a cliff-hanger directly followed by the third book, while the first book stands on its own and the main story is closed at the end of the book.

To close this, if you like the main idea of the Singularity, I suggest reading Avogadro Corp.
"The Singularity is Still Closer than it Appears ..."

Highly recommended, 5stars.


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