Towards a New Canon of Technothrillers | CrimeReads

The daddy of the modern techno-thriller, for me, is Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (2005 to 2007)-and the character of Lisbeth Salander in particular. She's a hacker who bursts into what might otherwise be a down-the-line tale of wealth and corruption: her skills a kind of black magic, inexplicable and irresistible beneath the book's surface. There were plenty of fictional hackers before Lisbeth Salander, but the Millennium trilogy feels like the first time the crime thriller was itself hacked on such a wildly successful scale. Poor old Michael Blomkvist plays second fiddle in his own story, stumbling in the wake of Lisbeth's revelations. Her power and fascination crackles through the series, an emblem of the transformations surrounding power in the modern world.