The Girl in the Spider’s WebBy David LagercrantzTranslated by George GouldingKnopf, 2015Make MeBy Lee ChildDelacorte, 2015Trigger MortisBy Anthony HorowitzHarper, 2015In 2008, along came Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and the rest, as they say, is history. Larsson turned in three Salander novels before he died an untimely death at the age of fifty in 2004. They were first published in Sweden and then worldwide, and by the time the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009), appeared here, Salander was everybody’s charismatic bad girl ready to take on the world. When the third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2010) arrived, the number of copies already sold was astronomical! Lisbeth is a pierced anorexic punk with Attitude big time. She has an abusive past that is the stuff of unspeakable nightmares. The computer doesn’t exist that she can’t hack. By the end of what became the Millennium Trilogy, Lisbeth was rich as Croesus —her gains often (masterfully) ill gotten. I called her “intriguing, mesmerizing, and addictive.” In my review of the third, I added, “Lisbeth Salander is surely one of the most original female characters in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction. I will miss her.”Happily, she’s back in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, written by Swedish journalist, biographer, and novelist David Lagercrantz. A headline-making legal battle between the author’s heirs and his longtime girlfriend Eva Gabrielsson, who was vehemently against the publication of another Salander novel, shrouded this book in controversy, secrecy, and delay. Undeterred, Lagercrantz has done the Larsson legacy proud.The Girl in the Spider’s Web is a superb thriller, faithful to the characters and the world Larsson created while branching out in new directions. Crusading investigative journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, is still center stage at Millennium magazine. He and his colleagues are currently fighting off being overrun and overruled by arrogant corporate gurus from a Norwegian newspaper empire that owns a third of their magazine’s shares. He’s also hard on the heels of a story that pulls him back into Lisbeth Salander’s orbit. In a convoluted but thoroughly compelling way, the pair are drawn into the case of Professor Franz Balder, world renowned authority on Artificial Intelligence. His murder is the MacGuffin (to use Hitchcock’s term for a plot catalyst) of this novel. His violent demise is linked to a cybercriminal conspiracy involving the Russian mafia and the U.S. government.Of course, when it comes to computer wizardry and flying unconstrained through cyberspace, Lisbeth Salander is front and center, head and shoulders above everyone else. Her latest coup in Active Signals Surveillance, a.k.a. hacking, is the NSA—yes that NSA. Salander, aided and abetted by her merry band of Hacker Republic cohorts bearing names like Plague, Trinity, Bob the Dog, Flipper, Zod and Cat, who know her as “Wasp” has successfully penetrated “the puzzle palace,” as that agency in Maryland is affectionately dubbed by insiders:

Hacker Republic knew better than most that the NSA had outrageously overstepped its boundaries in recent years. These days the organization did not confine itself to eavesdropping on terrorists and potential security risks, or even just foreign heads of state and other powerful figures, but listened in on everything, or nearly everything. …The agency had become one immeasurable, watchful, evil eye.

The senior security chief of this evil eye, NSA, is one Edwin Needham—Ed the Ned, as he was sometimes called. A pit bull personality, he was considered the best IT technician in the business:

…Nobody was damn well going to crack his system. …Needham and his team had tightened internal surveillance “so that no new whistle-blowers can pop up and punch us in the nose” and during countless sleepless nights created something which he alternatively called “an unbreakable wall” or “a ferocious little bloodhound.”“No fucker can get in, and no fucker can dig around without permission,” he said. And he was enormously proud of that.

Except that one fine November morning someone does. Ed gets the message: “Chill out Ed. Why don’t you stick around for a ride? I’ve got Root…”This means somebody out there has the highest privilege level of access to their system. Ed goes ballistic. “It’s a hacker, a fucking superhacker, and I’m going to cut his balls off.”Soon after, Lagercrantz has a lovely scene detailing just how “the fucking superhacker” Salander “pulled down NSA’s trousers,” to use her coinage, guaranteeing that Needham would be her uber-nemesis for life, if he can ever find her.Next to Salander, the novel’s most compelling character is Balder’s 8-year-old autistic son, August. He’s an idiot savant who is incapable of speech but is extraordinarily gifted as an artist and mathematician. He witnesses his father’s murder and plays a crucial role in tracking down the killer. The bond between August and Salander is beautifully wrought and deeply affecting. She becomes his fierce protector and will go to any lengths to shield him from his father’s enemies. It’s the Salander we all know and love.Many of the characters from the Millennium Trilogy return and Lagercrantz excels at putting his own stamp on them while remaining true to Larsson. Among them is the rabbi-quoting Criminal Inspector Jan Bublanski, known to his colleagues by the misnomer Officer Bubble. He’s always in Salander’s corner. Salander’s former guardian Holger Palmgren, one of the good guys in her life, is here, as is another fan, Dragan Armansky, who was Salander’s boss at Milton Security. For a psychopath without any social graces she’s got quite a following. A particularly chilling addition is her long lost evil fraternal twin Camilla. She has taken over the criminal network formerly led by their father and is a daunting adversary.In the end, though, The Girl in the Spider’s Web—like Larsson’s trilogy—is all about Salander. Oh, Blomkvist is definitely still part of her life, but it is the girl who continues to hold us and Lagercrantz in her thrall. He gives her free rein almost as if she, not the author, is the one pulling the strings. As I’ve said before, she remains the gold standard against which all others are compared.Jack Reacher is another original—a loner, an ex-military cop, he lives “Nowhere in the world. Right here, today.” As Lee Child’s standout 20th Reacher novel Make Me begins (after 2014’s Personal), he gets off a Chicago-bound train in a town in the middle of endless Oklahoma called Mother’s Rest because he’s curious about the name. None of the locals, a surly lot right out of a gritty Western, seem to know the origin of the name, but from the get-go they treat Reacher like a leper. The only other visitor is an extremely attractive female (de rigueur when Reacher is around) named Michelle Chang. She’s a former FBI agent turned PI whose partner, Keever, has mysteriously disappeared. Never one to ignore a damsel in distress or a mystery, he joins forces with her. Pretty soon, they are both knee deep in hostility and painfully aware that their every move is under scrutiny. By the time they get out of town they’ve worn out their unwelcome, because as Reacher observes: “The only fights you truly win are the ones you don’t have.”The partner’s trail takes them to Arizona, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and back to where they began. Along the way they are pursued by all manner of miscreants, some crude, some polished, all potentially lethal. The action, as usual, is nonstop. At the core of the complex plot is the nefarious underbelly of the Internet, the Deep Web. It’s a new kind of evil for Jack Reacher, one whose tentacles leave a permanent mark.With masterful timing, Child leads us step by step towards a climax we know in our bones is going to be horrific. When the secrets of Mother’s Rest are laid bare, they are darker and more sinister than anyone could imagine. Chang is unlike any lady Reacher has encountered before, and there is an unexpected twist at the end you will never see coming.Child said recently in an interview that he thinks it is Reacher’s supreme self-confidence, his iron certainty, that readers find so tremendously appealing. He’s an anchor in a rudderless world. And Make Me reveals him to be much more. This is one of the best of a terrific series.Jeopardy Lane, the latest Bond girl in Trigger Mortis, a James Bond novel by Anthony Horowitz, has absolutely nothing in common with Lisbeth Salander. In fact, I suspect Salander would loathe her. Despite her name, Jeopardy—who is working for the U.S. Secret Service—is just not unconventional enough for our Tattoo lady. Lisbeth might find Pussy Galore more interesting. Pussy, once head of a lesbian organization “The Cement Mixers,” was brought in by Auric Goldfinger to pull off the heist of the century—rob Fort Knox (Goldfinger by Ian Fleming 1959).Trigger Mortis is set in 1957, mere weeks after agent 007 Bond has consigned Goldfinger to his Maker. Bond is now bedding Pussy (I know, I know, of course he is) in his London flat. (Fleming has been accused of being humorless by some critics, ditto Bond). Try reading some of the novels with a straight (sorry, Pussy) face.To carry on with this newest novel, Bond and Pussy are at the breakfast table and he’s annoyed because she knows exactly how long to boil his egg. Domesticity has never been his strong suit nor, for that matter, hers. So there is trouble brewing midst the bliss. But before you can say “licensed to kill”—which, as we all know, Bond is—he’s off to work. He has just entered his office in the British Secret Service headquarters when his phone rings. It is M’s Chief of Staff. “Can you come up?” he asks. “M wants a word.” M, in case you are one of the twelve people in the world who don’t know this, is his boss:

And that was it. Eight words that might mean anything: a change of duty, an invitation, the need for an immediate death. Bond sucked once more on his cigarette, then ground it out and went to meet his fate.

He is ushered into M’s office by Miss Moneypenny, who has been his private secretary forever. She’s unabashedly smitten with Bond, calls him James in a slightly provocative way and he responds by flirting with her outrageously. We met her in Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953). In 2005, The Moneypenny Diaries, a tongue-in-cheek tell-all account of the true facts behind the crucial events that occurred in 1962, was released for publication by Moneypenny’s niece: “If what she wrote was true, then the Bond series was, at the very least based firmly on truth…. Ian Fleming had reported the events of the time with an alarming degree of accuracy.”But back to 1957 and Horowitz’s Bond novel wherein M is focused on the extremely dangerous world of the International Grand Prix. When M asks Bond what he can tell him about a Russian racing car called the Krassny, Bond isn’t just up to speed on its “sixteen cylinders.” He also knows that they’re arranged in “two banks of eight.” And with that Bond’s off to the races in Germany, behind the wheel of a Maserati at the Nürburgring track to try and prevent a Russian assassin from blowing away a British comer. Needless to say, things get pretty hairy.Believe it or not, this is just the tip of what we might call the rabid reds iceberg. For SMERSH—a contraction of Smiert Spionum, meaning death to spies—has reared its ugly Russian head. Bond has a long, bloody history with them. They are backing a particularly crazed Korean villain known as Jason Sin. Part one of his plan is to raze the Empire State to the ground. Part two: make it look like this catastrophe has been caused by an incompetently built or piloted U.S. rocket. This will throw a large monkey wrench into the American’s race for space. How Bond foils all this is the stuff that fuels outlandishly fantastical spy novels.It’s all enormous fun. There are small, thoroughly modern touches: Bond has a gay friend; Pussy goes back to girls. Jeopardy Lane “reluctantly” succumbs to Bond’s many charms. Horowitz, who had access to some of Fleming’s notes that have only recently come to light, enhances the Fleming legacy. The opening sentence of Trigger Mortis sets us up: “It was that moment in the day when the world has had enough.” Have a dry martini a la 007: in a deep champagne goblet put three measures of Gordons, one of vodka, and half a measure of Kina Lillet. Add ice and shake it very well until it’s very cold, then add a thin slice of lemon peel. Nostrovia! And you’re ready to take on Putin.____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.