Stieg Larsson's last manuscript is, fittingly, a mystery all its own

STOCKHOLM — It is September in Sachs Harbour, northern Canada. In the cold and desolate landscape, Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander are about to begin a new adventure.

But their journey in the fourth book of Stieg Larsson's best-selling "Millennium" crime series is a mystery. The book was left unfinished on the author's laptop when he died suddenly in 2004 at age 50.

Only two people know about the content of the manuscript: Larsson's longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsson, who has refused to talk about it and won't reveal its whereabouts; and Larsson's friend John-Henri Holmberg, who received an e-mail about the book from Larsson less than a month before his death on Nov. 9, 2004.

Holmberg said that Larsson was 320 pages into the fourth book.

"The plot is set 120 kilometers north of Sachs Harbour, at Banks Island in the month of September," Larsson wrote in the e-mail, which Holmberg made available to The Associated Press recently.

Holmberg, who first met Larsson at a science-fiction convention in the 1970s, said his friend had finished the beginning and the end of the story.

"Did you know that 134 people live in Sachs Harbour, whose only contact with the world is a postal plane twice a week when the weather permits?" Larsson wrote. "But there are 48,000 musk-ox and 80 different types of wildflowers that bloom during two weeks in early July, as well as an estimated 1,500 polar bears."

He says the author probably had a detailed outline of the story among his notes, making it possible for someone such as Gabrielsson — who worked closely with Larsson on the first three books — to complete the manuscript.

However, Holmberg points out that completing the story would have to be done soon so it doesn't become just a "historic curiosity."

"The risk ... is that it turns into one of those idiotic things like 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' " he said, referring to Charles Dickens' half-finished final work that many other writers tried to complete after his death.

For publisher Norstedts, getting the last book out in print could be a gold mine. Larsson's trilogy about a darker side of Sweden, where a tattooed computer hacker and journalist get entangled in murder mysteries, sex-trafficking scandals and secret government units, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and is selling more than 50,000 copies a day in the United States. A Swedish-language film of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" came out last year and was a surprise hit. Filming begins next year on a Hollywood remake. The adaptation of the second book, "The Girl Who Played With Fire," is in theaters now.

Gabrielsson — who is involved in a thorny conflict with the author's father and brother, Erland and Joakim Larsson — initially acknowledged she had the laptop containing the fourth manuscript. However, in an interview with Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet in June, Gabrielsson said she doesn't want to see any other book in the Millennium series published and said she does not have the manuscript. Joakim Larsson said in an e-mail that he doesn't know where it is now.