Fatal Gambit

Claire Lidman died fourteen years ago.

So why does she appear in the background of a recent holiday snap taken in Venice?

Her husband brings the anomaly to Hans Rekke and Micaela Vargas. Initial scepticism gives way to cautious belief, but Rekke is falling apart again and Vargas has her own problems. Her gangster brother is threatening to silence her if she doesn't get off his case.

Meanwhile, Rekke's daughter Julia has a new boyfriend she's determined to keep secret. He sees something in her she can't see herself, but there are hints of a darker side.

Most troubling of all, Rekke is hearing whispers of a name he hasn't heard for years. A rival from his youth whose restless evil links all the threads in this incipient case. The pieces are laid and he's already one move ahead. The name of the game is revenge.

Excellent . . . Part of the fun is Lagercrantz's deliberate use of Holmesian tropes -there's a Moriarty-like criminal mastermind, and Vargas and Rekke echo Holmes and Watson in more ways than one - but he departs from Conan Doyle's template with a complex, borderline-baroque mystery plot, to thrilling effect. By the end of the pulse-pounding denouement, readers will be breathless for the next installment Publishers Weekly

David Lagercrantz was born in 1962, and is an acclaimed author and journalist. In 2015 The Girl in the Spider's Web (2015), his continuation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, became a worldwide bestseller and was made into a film by Sony Pictures (2018). He is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Fall of Man in Wilmslow, and the fifth and sixth books in the Millennium series, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (2017) and The Girl Who Lived Twice (2019). Dark Music, the first Rekke and Vargas Investigation, will be published in the UK in 2022.

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