The Girl Who Played with Fire: A Lisbeth Salander Novel (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Series) Mass Market Paperback – November 22, 2011

How do you top a book that was excellently plotted, filled with memorable characters and an intriguing mystery? Apparently, by changing up the formula, filling out the already great characters with even more character and spinning a mystery that's more devilish, more immediate and more character-driven than before. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson created an excellent book that marked the beginning of a great author whose life was cut tragically short. The Girl Who Played with Fire cements his status as a premiere thriller writer. For those who haven't read the first book, beware because this review will obviously discuss the first book.At the end of Tattoo, our two characters Blomkvist and Salander have had a falling out and haven't spoken to each other. Meanwhile, Bjurman, the evil sadist who was a minor yet insidious character in Tattoo, is still fuming over Salander's way of getting back at him by branding him as the sadist he is and holding onto a tape documenting his evilness. The Girl Who Played with Fire starts out with a few different story strands like Tattoo. Also, like Tattoo these apparently divergent stories end up colliding in shocking ways. You have Salander's mysterious story, Bjurman's attempt to get rid of Salander on one hand. On the other, there's the Millennium paper side of things that is going to publish a book on sex trafficing that will expose a variety of members in Swedish culture as being a part of it. The stories converge in a shocking sequence of violence that propels the rest of the story forward.Unlike Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire's story is much more immediate and character driven. It delves more into Salander's character and answers many questions fans will have had when they finished the first book. It's also much better paced and written. One of the complaints I had about the first novel was that a lot of paragraphs had poor transitions into each other, making some sections feel more like vignettes than an interconnected story. Fire plays out much better and the transitions were much smoother. One area that tended to break my connection to the story were sometimes stupid characters. At times, characters do thinks that seem to be more for the sake of moving the plot forward than for anything realistic. Sometimes obvious clues are missed and other times the characters (particularly the police) seem completely ill suited for their jobs. That said, character development for Salander is front and center, this time, and her story is one with quite a few little twists and turns. Unlike Tattoo, where I figured out the central mystery pretty quickly into it, Fire surprised me multiple times in the direction it took. My recommendation is to know as little about the story as possible and just let it take you along its tumultuous journey.I was really surprised with The Girl Who Played with Fire. It upped the ante in terms of storytelling and pacing and presented some shocking situations that really sold me on Larsson's ability as an author. I also really enjoyed Larsson's framing of the story as an algebraic equation. Much like his use of statistics for the previous novel, Larsson uses an algebraic equation to introduce the sections and while it's not as obvious a connection as the stats, it becomes an ingenious framing device that sells the ending. Like Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire deals, once again, with Men Who Hate Women (as the Swedish original title indicates), but it tackles it in a larger purview. An excellent read and a startling critique on Swedish society, it is a powerful thriller and one I'd recommend without a single reservation.

Excellent! Never disappointing and hard to put down. I really appreciate the life the author, Stieg Larsson, brought to these books telling the tales of Lisbeth Salander. He had such talent as a writer and how sad it is he died before what should have been his time. These books are exceptional thrillers and I had great difficulty stopping myself from continuing to read each night because the storyline is easy to immerse yourself in so deeply you don’t want to come back out. I only wish that the English director and producer that had brought The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to film in Hollywood would highly consider making the rest of these books into movies. They are stories that deserve to be told and even with the human trafficking that goes on in our world even now. Lisbeth Salander is a heroine to so many women including myself who would’ve liked to have handled such violently abusive treatment by such ruthless tyrants in such a manner as she had. The story of her life though sorrowful in its depths is still about unwavering strength and resilience in the face of unquestionable adversity. I highly recommend these books. This is actually my second time around reading them yet again.

Stieg Larsson is a writer with a social agenda. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (DRAGON TATTOO), he turns his lens to corporate corruption and sexual violence against women. In The Girl Who Played with Fire (FIRE), he focuses on the sex trade, and all of the corrupt journalists, police officers, and lawyers who collude with the thugs who trade in the trafficking of Eastern European women for sex. DRAGON TATTOO introduced us to a host of complex, fascinating characters--Lisbeth Salander, Mikael Blomkvist, Erika Berger, the staff of Millennium magazine, Nils Bjurman, Dragan Armansky, Holger Palmgren, and Mimmi--who are absolutely central to the plot of FIRE as well. In FIRE, crimes that surround the sex trade, including the murders of Bjurman, and two others, are woven into Salander's personal story and provide the key to her mysterious past. Salander is suspected of commiting these murders and yet readers know--or at least hope--that she is innocent. Involved, yes, but we must believe that she is somehow innocent. So, taking our cue from many of Larsson character, we put on the coffee, and delve into this wonderfully plotted thriller.The novel opens with a genius prologue. In it, we read of a young Salander who is being held captive by a malicious man who by all appearances seems to be emotionally and sexually abusing her, and subjecting her to sadistic practices and solitary confinement. Since the novel--and the three murders it needs to solve--revolves around the sex trade, I immediately assumed that Salander's mysterious past must have had some connection with the sex trade and that she herself possibly was one of the unlucky girls who was a victim of the trade.Through a clever plot twist, Larsson upends the assumptions that readers may have made in the prologue. It's not a sadistic sex offender or rapist like Nils Bjurman who is holding Salander captive, but (without giving it away) something much more mundane. So, the sadistic torture chamber a la Martin Vanger gives way to something more ordinary, which then allows Larsson to launch a biting social critique of some of the most commonplace social institutions.The plot of FIRE is complex, with a veritable menagerie of characters, and keeping them straight can be sometimes confusing. Milennium magazine is slated to publish a freelance writer's story on the sex trade (based on said writer's girlfriend's doctoral dissertation) when the two, shortly after a visit from Salander, are found murdered in their apartment. Not only this, but Nils Bjurman is found murdered in his apartment on the same night. Salander is pinned for the murders, and hides out from the authorities, using her amazing abilities to survey the scene through her laptop. The police launch an investigation and we meet a host of interesting detectives. Meanwhile, Blomkvist and Dragan Armansky, both of whom Salander has all but ignored for the past two years, both believe Salander is innocent and each investigates the crime. Keeping the threads of each investigation separate is a challenge for this reader.FIRE is different from DRAGON TATTOO in that it focuses mostly on the character of Lisbeth Salander. The middle section is largely a police procedural. FIRE does not delve into the horrific depths that DRAGON TATTOO did. If there is horror in FIRE, it lies in a family's dark secrets rather than a sadist's torture chamber, and the cruelty of one family member to another.Parts of the novel seemed improbable, and even bordered on the absurd. For example, the characters of Paolo Roberto and "The Giant" Niedermann seemed either unlikely to exist at all, or unrealistically "played" by the author in service of the plot's action scenes. I also found Salander's tenacious rebound in the novel's conclusion unlikely at best. (I was rooting for her all the way, no doubt, but felt the scene was a bit too far fetched.) The novel frames each section with an epigraph devoted to mathematical theorems. We discover that Salander is at work trying to solve Fermat's theorem. Yet what is the connection between Fermat's famous riddle and Salander's own personal quest to find resolution in her past? I read and reread the section, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how she solves the mathematical conundrum at the novel's conclusion.The novel introduces several elements that are not resolved at the end, but will presumably be taken care of in the third installation, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest: What will Ericka Berger's professional fate be? What will come of Milennium magazine? And what was the significance of the crime that Salander witnessed while staying on Grenada?In my opinion, Larsson does an amazing job of writing a perfectly plotted thriller with a social conscience. I really liked how FIRE, like DRAGON TATTOO, takes up the issue of violence against women. There was surprisingly little said about the actual sex trade, but the novel did make unexpected forays into GLBT issues by introducing lesbian or bisexual characters, and showing the overwhelming prejudices that still exist on behalf of the police investigators and the media, who are quick to deploy vicious stereotypes. Larsson has created a gem in the character of Lisbeth Salander. I'm sure that readers of all political persuasions (and attitudes towards feminism and women's rights) will be rooting for this young woman who has been so victimized by male-dominated institutions and society's pervasive prejudices against women. (I guess that if the enlightened Scandinavian country of Sweden is still struggling with gender prejudice, then we all still are.)I thoroughly enjoyed FIRE, and could not put the book down until I had reached the conclusion. With that said, I felt that it did not live up to the heights achieved by DRAGON TATTOO, but I would imagine that it would be difficult to achieve such a literary feat twice in one's life. You must read this!