Review - The Girl Who Played with Fire By Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Played with Fire is the second in Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (the first being The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the third will be The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest). While the first book stands on its own, you should really read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before reading this one. The Girl Who Played with Fire sees the return of Larsson’s two protagonists, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander.

While Blomkvist plays a large role in the book, the main character is Salander. Millennium is approached by a freelance writer and his partner to do an expose on the sex slave trade in Sweden and name the names of johns, including government officials and police officers. Before the issue can run they both end up dead and evidence at the scene points to Salander as the killer. Salander soon becomes the subject of a nationwide manhunt.

Salander, whose response to someone attacking her with a gun is to get a bigger gun, decides to find out who really killed the journalists. In the process of Salander’s efforts we learn her back-story and toward the end we find out what “All the Evil” is that was hinted at in the first book. We learn why Salander has such distrust of any governmental entity, inclining the police. And why her official government file shows her as a psychotic who is barely literate and a societal outcast, when in fact she is a genius with a photographic memory.

Salander is one of the most complex and fascinating characters I have encountered in mystery fiction. While brilliant, she completely ignores most of societal norms including those of social interaction. In fact some of them appear to be a complete mystery to her. Blomkvist mused in the first book that she might have Asperger syndrome, Salander has too much insight into peoples’ motivations for that to be the case. She also has a very strict moral code that does not match up well with the Swedish legal system. One clear driving force in her life is she hates men that hate women and will seek revenge, or in her mind justice, to redress any woman wronged.

Larsson continues his theme of Swedish society’s hypocritical ambivalence toward violence against and exploitation of women. Further, in revealing Salander’s back-story he criticizes how the Swedish government can fail its citizens by the failure and corruption of those charged with protecting the weakest members of society.

This book was not quite as good as Larsson’s first work, but that may be because it is the second work in a trilogy. Thus, is does not stand alone, it is built on the first work and needs the last to complete the story. The book ends with the revelation of and confrontation with those that are responsible for the murders and “All the Evil” but stops, leaving the fallout of these revelations to the third book. That being said, this is a great book and I am impatiently waiting the English language release of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.