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The Girl Who Played with Fire
by Stieg Larsson
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Staff Pick
Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo caught the world by surprise with its relevant and riveting story. The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second novel in the Millennium trilogy, reads even more smoothly. It leaves me wanting much more from this great writer, who died in 2004 after completing just three novels.
Recommended by Andrea, Powell's City of Books
Synopses & Reviews The electrifying follow-up to the phenomenal best seller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ("An intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller", The Washington Post), and this time it is Lisbeth Salander, the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker, who is the focus and fierce heart of the story.
Mikael Blomkvist — crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium — has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.
On the eve of publication, the two reporters responsible for the story are brutally murdered. But perhaps more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander.
Now, as Blomkvist — alone in his belief in her innocence — plunges into his own investigation of the slayings, Salander is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all. Review: "Fans of intelligent page-turners will be more than satisfied by Larsson's second thriller, even though it falls short of the high standard set by its predecessor, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which introduced crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist and punk hacker savant Lisbeth Salander. A few weeks before Dag Svensson, a freelance journalist, plans to publish a story that exposes important people involved in Sweden's sex trafficking business based on research conducted by his girlfriend, Mia Johansson, a criminologist and gender studies scholar, the couple are shot to death in their Stockholm apartment. Salander, who has a history of violent tendencies, becomes the prime suspect after the police find her fingerprints on the murder weapon. While Blomkvist strives to clear Salander of the crime, some far-fetched twists help ensure her survival. Powerful prose and intriguing lead characters will carry most readers along." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: Oddly enough, Lisbeth Salander was not at the center of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," Stieg Larsson's long, complex, thoroughly absorbing thriller published in the United States last year. Despite sporting the beastly tattoo, Salander played second banana to journalist Mikael Blomkvist as he solved a decades-old mystery involving a missing member of a wealthy Swedish family. ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) As if to make up for that slight, early in this sequel, "The Girl Who Played With Fire," Salander's name and photo appear in newspapers all over Sweden — and not for her greater glory. Evidence places her at the scenes of three killings, and the gun used in two of them bears her fingerprints. The accompanying news stories portray her as an eccentric loner if not a nut case. Readers of "Dragon Tattoo" will not be surprised to learn that Salander is indeed still withdrawn and irascible — and also highly effective as a computer snoop. As she dons disguises and changes apartments and eludes the police, she has her old colleague and lover, Blomkvist, on her side, but given his tendency to fool around with other women, she refuses to have anything to do with him. (A well-meaning chap who simply capitalizes on Sweden's famously permissive attitude toward carnal pleasure, Blomkvist can't understand why Salander avoids him.) Yet Salander is a rather different person from the brilliant but touchy Goth of "Dragon Tattoo." She is seasoned by a recent trip around the world. She has been phasing out her tattoos and piercings, partly because ostentation can be a spoiler for a private investigator and partly because they don't mean much to her anymore. And she is systematically becoming better acquainted with a subject for which she has always had a flair: higher mathematics. Besides putting her freedom in jeopardy, then, being fingered as a triple murderer threatens to reverse months of personal growth. While looking into the crimes for which she is wanted, Salander again demonstrates her formidable computer-hacking skills. One of her best shows comes when she needs to "borrow" a car; targeting the parking garage of a company where she used to work, she reprograms its surveillance system from afar. "Between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. (the cameras) would show a repeat of the previous half-hour, but with an altered time code." Guess who will be on hand to do what in that "missing" half-hour. Those who know the young woman well take her prowess into account. Consider Nils Erik Bjurman, the guardian she reports to as a condition for staying out of the mental hospital to which she was once committed. Bjurman raped her in the first book, only to be punished by Salander herself, who caught him by surprise, tied him up and gave him a humiliating, homemade tattoo. Aware that she can read his computer's mind, the odious guardian is careful not to leave any cybertrace of his plan to have her taken out by a hit man. Even so, Bjurman comes to a bad end. Salander's estranged lover, Blomkvist, is craftier. Well aware that he can't keep Salander from breaking into his computer, he entices her to think better of him by creating a folder into which he stuffs whatever he learns about the ongoing murder investigation, along with his assurances that he believes in her innocence. In other words, he asks to be hacked. Slowly, in some of the novel's most dramatic sections, Salander begins to come around, and the pair tiptoe toward a reconciliation. The Swedish title of "Dragon Tattoo" is "Men Who Hate Women." That motif runs through the new novel like a slushy undercurrent, all the more disturbing in light of Sweden's aforementioned sexual liberalism. If contempt for women is widespread in a country where love is all around, the reader might wonder, what help is there for societies still enmeshed in puritanism? "The Girl Who Played With Fire" confirms the impression left by "Dragon Tattoo." Here is a writer with two skills useful in entertaining readers royally: creating characters who are complex, believable and appealing even when they act against their own best interest; and parceling out information in a consistently enthralling way. The sharp-eyed may catch Larsson leaning on coincidence a bit too often in the new book, but overall his storytelling is so assured that he can get away with these peccadilloes. Less forgivable, perhaps, is a climactic episode that seems too obviously contrived to make readers gasp. Stieg Larsson died in 2004, at age 50, after a heart attack, leaving three completed novels featuring Blomkvist and Salander (and rumor has it that part of a fourth was found in his computer). It's a shame that Larsson was taken from us so soon, but it's a gift that before his time ran out he managed to produce at least two first-rate thrillers, and perhaps three. We'll know for sure next year, when the last book is scheduled to appear in English. Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle, who is the mysteries editor of The Washington Post Book World. His new book, 'Mile-High Fever: Silver Mines, Boom Towns and High Living on the Comstock Lode,' has just been published., Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "Warning — addictive thriller. All who taste it get hooked!" Elle Review: "Salander is...a complete original, larger than life yet firmly grounded in realistic detail, utterly independent yet at her core a wounded and frightened child." Booklist Starred Review Review: "...[T]he plot has the requisite chases, cliffhangers and bloodshed. Not to mention Fermat's theorem. Fans of postmodern mystery will revel in Larsson's latest." Kirkus Reviews Review: "This is complex and compelling storytelling at its best, propelled by one of the most fascinating characters in recent crime fiction." Library Journal Review: "Mr. Larsson's two central characters...transcend their genre and insinuate themselves in the reader's mind through their oddball individuality, their professional competence and, surprisingly, their emotional vulnerability." New York Times
Video About the Author Stieg Larsson was the editor-in-chief of the anti-racist magazine Expo. He was a leading expert on right-wing extremist organisations. He died in 2004, soon after delivering the text of the novels that make up the Millennium Trilogy.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780307269980
- Author:
- Larsson, Stieg
- Publisher:
- Knopf Publishing Group
- Subject:
- General
- Publication Date:
- July 2009
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 503
- Dimensions:
- 9.70x6.16x1.49 in. 1.90 lbs.
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