Review: 'Red Queen' heroine Antonia Scott will appeal to Lisbeth Salander fans

There's no chess, no royalty and no Lewis Carroll in "Red Queen," but there is plenty of red blood.

Juan Gómez-Jurado's thriller, the first in a projected series, is for readers who miss Lisbeth Salander ("The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo") and need a new, messed-up, incredibly brilliant, socially inept, semi-detective in their lives. She's Antonia Scott, who has been cooped up in her Madrid attic for months, ordering takeout food and grieving personal losses she blames on herself, until the police present her with a serial killer so intriguing she's forced to rejoin the living.

Like Salander, Scott works with an idiosyncratic guy who's her "in" to official police channels, although it's not clear how long that will be true for Jon Gutierrez, who is hiding about a million secrets from his bosses in Bilbao and who colors outside the lines pretty much all the time. Scott and Gutierrez hate each other, until they don't, and their grudging respect provides a human element as they investigate one of those serial killers who likes to think of their crimes as art projects, filled with not-so-subtle meanings and clues.

In the middle of "Red Queen," when things get a little pokey and the grisly details of the crimes begin to drag things down, it's the humor in the Scott/Gutierrez interactions that keeps things moving. I'm looking forward to meeting up with them again in future volumes. The next two, already published in Spain, are probably being translated even as you read this.

Red Queen

By: Juan Gómez-Jurado, translated by Nicholas Caistor.

Publisher: Minotaur, 374 pages, $27.99.