Translated by Michael Meigs
Amazon Crossing
Published November 11, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Julia Malmros is about to take a huge step forward in her career. After working as a detective in Stockholm, she began to write a series of crime novels, and while it has met with success, a new opportunity has arrived. She has just been asked to a new installment in the hugely popular Millennium series, continued by various authors after the original writer’s untimely death. She quickly researches and composes a new adventure for the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but things go spectacularly wrong and she’s left with an orphaned manuscript and a public scandal. Should she alter the characters’ names and publish it anyway? She’s still pondering her next move when an old childhood friend and five others visiting his summer residence near her island cottage are slaughtered by masked gunmen who escape without a trace. Joined by an eccentric but gifted young man with poor social skills, she sets out to discover what led to the mass murder, setting off a globe-spanning adventure of their own.
It’s hard not to wonder if John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of Let the Right One In, found himself in Julia Malmros’s shoes, writing a volume in the Millennium series that was rejected, so he decided to publish it anyway with the names changed and the sexes of the main characters reversed. The protagonist pair bear strong resemblances to Stieg Larsson’s heroes – only Mikhail Blomqvist has been transformed into a middle-aged female crime novelist and Lisbeth Salander has turned into a young man with a similar difficulty connecting to others and a traumatic past involving a brutal childhood and incarceration at an insane asylum, where he was tortured by a perverted psychiatrist. Or perhaps the author is simply playing with the elements of the series, poking fun at the way it has been continued by others.
In any case, it may bear a resemblance to the popular series both in terms of the main characters and the extravagant plotting, but it lacks the original trilogy’s touches of feminist critique or its exuberant remixing of crime fiction traditions. It’s more of a pale imitation, focused primarily on the pairing of similar protagonists and a plot that leans on global intrigue, conspiracy, and thrills. The author is known as a horror writer, and that shows up here in the particularly gruesome, detailed description of the murders, though it is otherwise a standard crime thriller assembled out of Stieg Larsson’s popular ingredients. Billed as the first in a series, there will no doubt be more to come.
Though The Writing in the Water may seem to be a brazen knockoff of an internationally successful series, it’s to Amazon’s credit that they’ve published hundreds of translations in their Crossing imprint, and it’s to the translator’s credit that it reads as well as it does.