The Girl in the Spider's Web

Rating: 3.5 ⭐️ What I appreciate is that Lagercrantz kept the characters' personalities and overall behavior. However, sometimes I felt like the story was all over the place, and the pacing wasn't as the original trilogy. But I have to recognize this was a good story, and it made me curious about the next books.

I not know why I like these books. They're not particularly well written, overly complex, and none of the characters are that likeable. They rely heavily on exposition with two characters telling each other major bits of backstory, often second hand so it's not even the character concerned who's revealing something of importance. Often I found myself wondering how someone knew such detail about events they didn't even witness.
The author writes similarly to Larsson but manages to avoid some of his more irritating traits - no long passages describing which processor powers anyone's laptop here. There are some oddities: our main character is told to ditch his iPhone for an Android phone to avoid NSA hacking it - the book came out just as Apple were fighting the FBI over the right to prevent them having a back door and I can't help feeling Larsson would have devoted a few thousand words to a topic like that. Instead it feels like the author did a quick read of Wikipedia and grabbed some terms he doesn't entirely understand. There is a long exposition on autism which does read like a first year undergraduate literature review and the child's savant status is worryingly convenient.
As with the other books I found it difficult to keep track of who was who, or indeed to care who was who - there's an old Jewish detective who's lost his faith but finds love at the end (not really a spoiler) and it's difficult to care.
The story is a lot simpler than other books and maybe too simple. I was surprised that the whole thing seemed to end with a lot of book still to go - I was expecting a third act that didn't happen.
But in the end, and I think this is why I like these books (even if I don't love them), it was a good distraction and an interlude between ‘heavier' books.

not nearly as bad as a lot of people would have you believe, it's not like the originals are the best thing ever either (I did enjoy them, just think their quality may a bit overstated).
I do agree that Salander is not the main character and not in it enough, but then was she ever in the earlier books?