Pick of the Brown Bag
November 7, 2025
by
Ray Tate
Welcome to the Pick of the Brown Bag. For those of you new to the POBB, introductions are in order. My name is Ray Tate. I’m a one-man operation. I read the books. I write the reviews. I edit the reviews and finally post them.
Mostly I focus on comic books. For this edition, I’m doing something different and reviewing a pair of books without pictures. It’s not like I’m setting a precedent. Though I admit; such reviews here are rare.
Part One
At first, I was going to post a warning about Karin Smirnoff’s The Girl with Ice in Her Veins. You know. Avoid this book at all costs type of thing. The novel’s not a complete loss. I just don’t think you should buy it. Especially given the tariff-driven increase on book prices. Go to your local library, or at the very least, wait until it’s half-off at bargain book stores.
I realized that in reading the review of Ice in Her Veins you may not know where I’m coming from. Smirnoff introduces the non-Millennium cast members in her premiere Lisbeth Salander novel The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons.
I could have redirected you to Barnes and Noble where I left a short review of Eagle’s Talons. I thought that a cheat. Add to the fact that I really didn’t think Barnes and Noble would accept my scathing review of Ice in Her Veins. So, I went ahead and reread Eagle’s Talons. T’wasn’t a painful experience.
After, I would write a new, meatier review of Eagle’s Talons and contrast the novel with the vastly inferior sequel. Because Eagle’s Talons is that good and Ice in Her Veins is that bad.
Stieg Larsson authored the canon. Make no mistake. Anything else that’s written is mere fan fiction. It doesn’t matter if the authors earn a paycheck. They’re work is no more “real” than some literally poor fan with an idea on the internet. It’s all equal in terms of canon. Meaning. It’s not.
The body of works that come to pass will be no more “true” than the oodles of Sherlock Holmes stories being written even as I type. It doesn’t matter if you’re seeking money or not. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the canon, and I recently discovered he wrote additional Sherlock Holmes material that he did not include in his own canon. That is hilarious.
Sherlock Holmes and his cast are public domain characters. The surviving Larssons—father and brother—own the rights to Lisbeth, Mikael and the characters in the Millennium trilogy. That ownership will not be forever. One day, should humankind survive—an increasingly dicey wager, Lisbeth and Mikael will enter public domain.
With the author deceased, you should consider the Millennium cast’s passage already so. You want to write Lisbeth and Kalle Mikael adventures? Go right ahead and pick a corner of the internet. Just don’t ask for money, and you’ll be okay.
Case in point. Before Smirnoff’s novels and between David Lagercrantz’s Lisbeth Salander books, Titan published the comic book series The Girl Who Danced with Death, which is still the best non-canonical presentation to date. Yes. As much as I enjoyed Eagle’s Talons, a prose novel, Danced with Death an original comic book series is better.
Danced with Death isn’t counted as canonical in the extended Millennium series. Why not? It’s official. It’s licensed. People got paid. Etc. Etc. I’m not getting into this argument again. I just want to emphasize that the undisputed canon is Stieg Larsson’s three-body work. The rest are just flights of fancy with varying degrees of quality.
I’m not reviewing the canonicity of these two novels. I’m also not figuring out how Karin Smirnoff’s two novels fit with David Lagercrantz’s novels. For one thing I’m not a fan of Lagercrantz’s books. I read the first and remember little of it. I stopped reading the second. Quit after that.
Since Ice in Her Veins is a sequel, I will also look at how well the two Smirnoff novels mesh. Bottom line. They don’t. Next week in Part Two. The review of The Girl in the Eagle's Talons.
The Girl Who Danced With Death: ISBN 978-178-5869-655
The Girl in the Eagle's Talons: ISBN 978-0-593-53669-8
The Girl With Ice In Her Veins: ISBN 978-0-593-53671-1
