“Lisbeth Salander is back—and maybe better than ever.” —Lee Child “Fresh, fearless. . . . One of the great crime series of our time could not be in safer, more capable hands.” —Chris Whitaker INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Lisbeth Salander returns in this chilling new installment of the multi-million-copy bestselling Millennium series, from the author of The Girl in the Eagle's Talons . Sweden’s far north is growing colder; even in springtime, the town of Gasskas is buried under a relentless snow. As temperatures drop, tensions rise between a global corporation shamelessly exploiting the area's natural resources and wary locals who have scores to settle. A bomb blasts apart a crucial bridge. Soon after, a young journalist is found murdered. Meanwhile, Lisbeth is at home in Stockholm, looking to fill the void her last lover left behind. When she discovers that fellow hacker Plague has been kidnapped and taken up north, and finds her niece, Svala, on her doorstep, she has no choice but to return to Gasskas—with Mikael Blomkvist at her side. Blomkvist takes the helm at Gasskas's newspaper, and Lisbeth tries to locate Plague. But then Svala goes missing, and Lisbeth's worst fears come to haunt her. . . . Lured back to a lawless town full of predators disguised as saviors and foes disguised as friends, forced to face down their own troubling pasts and those of their loved ones, Salander and Blomkvist must untangle a history of violence before it's too late. The Girl with Ice in Her Veins is a twisty, vertiginous, hard-hitting thriller that breathes new life into Stieg Larsson's epic series and unforgettable characters. “Fully up to the standard of its celebrated predecessors. . . . Exciting work.” —Wall Street Journal “Smirnoff’s spin on the Millennium series exposes the characters’ emotional vulnerabilities without sacrificing the series’ complexity and unflinching thrills.” —Booklist “A treat for longtime series fans. . . . [There are] clever twists and poignant developments in the relationships among the core cast. This continues Smirnoff’s hot streak.” —Publishers Weekly “Criminally fast-paced.” —Femina “This author takes the Millennium series to a new level.” —Arbetarbladet “A splash of Tolkien, two scoops of Marvel, a shattered girl’s world. . . . A gaze that meets Larsson's feminist anger but continues to dig a little deeper.” —Västerbotten-kuriren “Karin Smirnoff’s language is worth reading for its own sake.” —Dagens Nyheter “Well-written and exciting.” —Dast KARIN SMIRNOFF is a bestselling author in her native Sweden where her books have sold more than 700,000 copies. Her debut novel, My Brother, was nominated for the prestigious August Prize. She was born in Umeå, a small hamlet in northern Sweden, near where she now lives and a short drive from where Stieg Larsson himself grew up. SARAH DEATH is a translator, literary scholar, and editor of the U.K.-based journal Swedish Book Review. Her translations from the Swedish include Ellen Mattson’s Snow, for which she won the Bernard Shaw Translation Prize. She lives and works in Kent, England. 1 There is a special place in hell for CEOs and venture capitalists. Men with webbed feet and arms that double as wings. Like migrating birds they take off as soon as the weather changes, but new ones always replace them. The sort who defy the cold and roll up their sleeves as the biting wind whines all around. Prospectors who can smell money. Big money, or they would have stayed in the sun. Like diviners, they put their ear to the granite and say, “Here. Here lie such extraordinary riches that no one will be able to refuse.” When the fun is over, when the seam has dried up or the metal prices have fallen, they won’t be the ones standing in a packed canteen telling those assembled that times are hard. They have a whole HR department to do their dirty work. They are already far away. Far from poisoned watercourses and contaminated ground, far from unemployed miners whose lungs have breathed in silica, asbestos and diesel fumes. The CEOs and venture capitalists are already on their way to new places, other mountains. Using different company names. With a fresh set of board members and a bundle of new money to wave under the noses of politicians, they are once again welcomed as heroes. Heroes who will take sparsely populated municipalities to new economic heights, create jobs and inject some belief in the future. It is night. Several degrees below freezing even though it is well into May. The grass crunches as he takes the path through the forest, his destination in sight a few hundred yards upstream along the Njakkaure. A river that flows past the decommissioned Gasskas mine, commonly known as “the Pit.” In the bright moonlight, buildings and spoil heaps tower up as if in some abandoned alpine village. From his vantage point he cannot see the Pit itself, and that is intentional. He feels a sudden shiver of nerves, but he was