Unpublished Stieg Larsson Book Exists

Buried at the bottom of a CBS News piece is a delightful answer to a long-running mystery: Did Stieg Larsson, the author of the wildly successful Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series finish the fourth book in the series before his death, as he had told his friends? Sort of. His brother Joakim confirmed yesterday that an unpublished manuscript exists—but it's for the fifth book in the planned 10-book series. "He thought that was more fun to write than book number four," he said.

But the manuscript is stuck in the middle of quite the family drama: It's currently in the possession of Larsson's girlfriend of 32 years, Eva Gabrielsson, who received nothing after his death; because Larsson had no will, his estate and the rights to his books—valued at $20 million—went to Larsson's father and brother. "We want to work with Eva," says Joakim. "We tried for nearly six years to get an agreement with her of some sort in any way. But she turned us down all the time for some reason." The Larssons say that were the book to surface, they wouldn't publish it.
(More Stieg Larsson stories.)