The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson ~ Books I Like

Monday, July 27, 2009

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson is that rare thing - a sequel that is even better than the book that went before. A suspenseful, remarkably moving novel . . . This is the best Scandinavian novel to be published in the U.S. since Smilla’s Sense of Snow . . . Salander is one of those characters who come along only rarely in fiction: a complete original, larger than life yet firmly grounded in realistic detail, utterly independent yet at her core a wounded and frightened child .

Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.

But he has no idea just how explosive the story will be until, on the eve of publication, the two investigating reporters are murdered. And even more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander—the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker who came to his aid in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and who now becomes the focus and fierce heart of The Girl Who Played with Fire.

As Blomkvist, alone in his belief in Salander’s innocence, plunges into an investigation of the slayings, Salander herself 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.

Much like his (Stieg Larsson) first book the Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, this complex novel is not just a thrilling read, but tackles head-on the kind of issues that Larsson himself railed against in society, such as endemic establishment corruption and the exploitation of women.

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