Well, at least they waited a decade, I guess. That counts as tasteful restraint these days.

The Swedish publisher of the best-selling The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy says it has hired an author to write a sequel to the series by Stieg Larsson, who died in 2004.

Norstedts said Tuesday it has signed a contract with I am Zlatan author David Lagercrantz for a new book about journalist Mikael Blomqvist and hacker Lisbeth Salander that is scheduled to be published in August 2015.

Has any of these zombie-fied sequels, in which a new author tries to write stories about recurring characters after an author dies, succeeded on an artistic level? Some of the James Bond sequel novels are not embarrassing, I guess, but they're not up to Fleming's standards, either. I just wish publishers would have the dignity to let these series go when the money starts to run out, rather than squeeze the intellectual properties to a pulp. It's disrespectful, it's short-sighted, and it's never artistically satisfying.