If you read one book this week The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz (MacLehose Press) R325Despite the objections of his long-term partner, Eva Gabrielsson, Stieg Larsson's estate went ahead with this fourth release in the Millennium series, handing the project over to Swedish journalist and author Lagercrantz, who - fans of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo will be pleased to learn - does a great job with what could have been a poisoned chalice. Lisbeth Salander and publisher Mikael Blomkvist are reunited once more in a ruthless battle against cyber-gangsters. If anything, Lagercrantz's plotting is cleaner and tighter than Larsson's, and he has brought in much to the dark, depraved world of the first three novels.The issue"As soon as it was published last week," The Observer noted of Morrissey's debut novel, List of the Lost (Penguin), "the internet erupted with the sound of a thousand contemptuous guffaws." Writing in The Guardian, Michael Hann called it an "unpolished turd", and in the London Sunday Times, Theo Tait described it as "gibberish from beginning to end", adding that it reads as if "it had been translated, perhaps from Hungarian, using an internet translation engine". A typical sentence: "The porky child becomes the marvel of steaming richness." One unintentionally hilarious passage is the odds-on favourite to take the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award later this year. It describes "the pained frenzy" of marathon runner Ezra's "bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza's body except for the otherwise central zone". (This, Tait claims, is actually one of the better passages in the book as it is both entertaining and vaguely comprehensible.)All of which is a great pity. Morrissey's 2013 memoir, Autobiography, was a fairly exhilarating read, and as a member of The Smiths he was one of the better lyricists of the 1980s. So we know he can put a few words together.Crash courseFive years ago historian Timothy Snyder published his acclaimed Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, which reassessed the horrors that befell Europe between 1933 and 1945 under Soviet and Nazi domination. His standout achievement here was to demonstrate how the two regimes fed off each other in a mutually destructive frenzy. He now returns to these monumental crimes with Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Bodley Head), and - with events in Syria and northern Iraq very much in mind - provides a compelling analysis about the destruction of nation states in order to first dehumanise and then destroy a people. "Affirming the end of the state," Snyder writes, "meant applying the law of the jungle and presenting it as actual law."The bottom line"I should confess I have always felt a little sorry for people who don't work for newspapers." - Mary McGrory: The First Queen of Journalism by John Norris (Viking)..