The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an EyeBy David LagercrantzTranslated by George GouldingKnopf, 2017Good Me Bad MeBy Ali LandFlatiron, 2017“First you find out the truth. Then you take revenge.” It’s the incendiary mantra that Lisbeth Salander spews out as much in sorrow as in anger in the latest installment of the Millennium series. In 2008, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo introduced Salander and the rest, as they say, is publishing history. Larsson turned in three Salander novels before he died an untimely death at the age of fifty in 2004. (Because Larsson was an investigative journalist a la Mikael Blomkvist, one of the pivotal characters in all the novels, there were a lot of rumors that there was something nefarious about his death. His closest confidants suggest that nothing could be farther from the truth and that he died of a massive heart attack. For me, personally, the matter will never be laid to rest.)The novels were first published in Sweden and then worldwide and by the time the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) appeared in the U.S., Salander was everybody’s idolized quintessential badass ready to take on the world. When the third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2010), arrived, the number of copies 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:

Salander handled computers as though she had made a pact with the Devil…she was a world class hacker and within an exclusive international community devoted to computer crime at the highest level—and not only to combating it—she was a legend.

By the close of what became the Millennium Trilogy, Lisbeth was rich as Croesus—her gains often (masterfully) ill gotten. I called her “intriguing, mesmerizing and addictive.” I mourned the fact that this was the last we would see of one of the most original female characters in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction.Thus it was that fans rejoiced when Salander returned in 2015’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web. After a protracted legal battle, the Swedish journalist, biographer and novelist David Lagercrantz, was chosen by the Larsson estate to extend the series. He remained faithful to the characters and the world Larsson created while quite effectively branching out in new directions. In it, Salander’s latest coup in Active Signals Surveillance, a.k.a. hacking, is none other than the NSA, which has evolved into one immeasurable, watchful evil eye. Salander, aided and abetted by her peerless band of Hacker Republic cohorts bearing names like Plague, Trinity, Bob the Dog, Flipper, Zod and Cat, and who know her as “Wasp,” successfully penetrates “the puzzle palace,” as that agency in Maryland is dubbed by insiders. To put a fine point on it, she pulls down NSA’s trousers. Another pivotal plot element in Spider’s Web is Salander’s rescue of a gifted autistic child who witnessed his father’s murder. She manages to get him and his mother safely out of harm’s way.Shielding the boy was no mean feat and she is paying for it at the start of the fifth in the series, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye. This installment finds Salander in Flodberga, the only maximum security women’s prison in Sweden. She’s serving a two month sentence for what the law regarded as “questionable actions” when she undertook to safeguard the child. To Blomkvist, the verdict against her was absurd and made him furious. He vented his spleen in all the media outlets, eventually calmed down, and is now as philosophical about Salander’s incarceration as she appears to be.For openers, she’s got the prison warden on an invisible leash. He’s terrified of her, and after a little special Salander style persuasion, has arranged for her to have internet access. He turns more than a blind eye when she targets the prison’s resident sadist, a woman who calls herself “Benito” (after Mussolini), for torturing a beautiful young Bangladeshi inmate, Faria Kazi. Salander’s Achilles heel has always been the bullying of those least able to protect themselves. She cleans Benito’s clock, as they say, and puts her out of business – at least temporarily.Meanwhile, Salander’s elderly former guardian, Holger Palmgren, one of the few people Salander completely trusts, comes across a crucial aspect of Salander’s shrouded past. It’s a document known as “The Registry” from the psychiatric clinic where Salander spent her horrific early years. Salander, along with Palmgren and Blomkvist, becomes convinced that this “Registry” hold clues to her identity. It also uncovers a larger crime perpetrated decades ago by an unscrupulous ring of doctors and social workers who performed unorthodox tests on twins who, like Salander, were separated at birth, to study their development. In the end, by the time she is released from prison, Salander’s life is further complicated by yet another personal tragedy – the one that triggered her revenge mantra. She meets it head on with an icy calm triggered by her flair for the unexpected.The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye is a complex, fascinating mystery. The pace never lets up and we marvel once again at the magical, mercurial, ever-bewitching Salander. There is absolutely no one like her. Oh, and as a bonus, we learn the meaning of the dragon tattoo on her back.The fifteen-year-old narrator of Ali Land’s Good Me Bad Me has a lot in common with Lisbeth Salander. However, as this remarkable debut unfolds, the resemblance is not visible on the surface. It lurks in the dark corners of the back of your mind. Something may not be right here, but what?Annie, the narrator, has suffered all her life at the hands of her sadistic and monstrous mother, who is a serial killer. Besides the physical abuse and emotional trauma inflicted on her by this heinous woman, Annie witnessed the torture and murder of nine young children in their home. The most recent, is a boy named Daniel whom Annie had a special affinity toward, which led to a fierce desire to protect him. His death is the proverbial straw that convinces Annie to turn her mother into the police.She is quickly placed in foster care with Mike, a psychologist, and his wife Saskia, and given a new name, Milly. Mike and Saskia know her true identity but their daughter, Phoebe, also fifteen, thinks she is yet another foster child they are taking in. Her hostility towards Milly takes sibling rivalry to a whole new level. It is compounded by the fact that her relationship with her mother is rocky at best. It doesn’t take long for Milly to discover that Saskia is addicted to drugs and carrying on an affair with her yoga instructor. At the exclusive private school where a spot has been found for Milly, she is constantly bullied by Phoebe and her friends. And when she forms an emotional attachment with a kind teacher, she is told by all and sundry in charge that she must back off!Mike takes on the role of her therapist as she prepares for her mother’s trial, which is twelve weeks away. Milly is, of course, the key witness, and despite the fact that she will have to see her mother in person, albeit behind a screen, she has rejected a live video link. She is determined to go into the courtroom. Mike doesn’t think this is wise but is unable to dissuade her. What he doesn’t know, what nobody knows, is that she lives with her mother’s voice constantly in her head:

…he doesn’t know the feelings I live with every day. That even though I’m no longer with you, a part of me still wants to please you and indulge my desire to be close to you again, the same room. The last chance I’ll get…. I can’t tell him, I’m not able to say it. That the person I want to run from is also the person I want to run to.

Her need to still be with her mother is one of the leitmotifs of the novel. It is well documented that abuse victims, when faced with a choice between the abuser and someone else will almost always choose the abuser. Volumes have been written about the psychology of what seems to be inexplicable behavior.Just a few days before the trial, Milly discovers that Mike is writing a book about her. Her emotions are mixed. Has he ever cared about her or has he just been using her as material for his book. It just adds to all of the inner demons she must grapple with. As the title of the book implies, the biggest question she faces is how much of her mother’s daughter is she? Does the apple ever fall far from the tree? The answer at the climax may or may not surprise you. But the journey to get there will grip you to the very end. Good Me Bad Me is a strong, assured, very special psychological thriller.____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.