The Girl Who Played with Fire

mass market paperback, 752 pages

English language

Published Nov. 22, 2011 by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Vintage.

ISBN:
978-0-307-94950-9
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4 stars (3 reviews)

The Girl Who Played with Fire (Swedish: Flickan som lekte med elden) is the second novel in the best-selling Millennium series by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. It was published posthumously in Swedish in 2006 and in English in January 2009. The book features many of the characters who appeared in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), among them the title character, Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant computer hacker and social misfit, and Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of Millennium magazine. Widely seen as a critical success, The Girl Who Played with Fire was also (according to The Bookseller magazine) the first and only translated novel to be number one in the UK hardback chart.

13 editions

Review of 'The Girl Who Played with Fire' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Millennium has another hot story to publish, a journalist has been researching and is about to expose a large network involving sex slaves and powerful people who have a lot to lose. When said journalist and his partner are found dead by Blomkvist, it just makes him want more than ever to publish the story and find the killer.

This book was so good! I confess I did not understand what the beginning had to do with the rest of the story, even though it would make a great short story. Was it for the readers to understand Salander's morals? To understand how she spent a year away? Nevertheless, it feels very disconnected to rest, which has a much faster pace than the previous volume and is impossible to put down. I loved every bit of it and when I could not read, I was thinking about the loose ends …

Review of 'The Girl Who Played with Fire' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Better than the first, but I was still very frustrated at the unnecessary amount of detail the author added. When reading crime books one tends to store every piece of information given, assuming that it's a richly-woven tapestry and everything is significant. The name of the lamp she buys for the kitchen at Ikea is, however, unrelated to anyfuckingthing. Why several pages needed to be devoted to this is beyond me. Is it humour, perverseness, poor editing? I can't tell.

Gripes aside, an action packed techno-political thriller with a broken anti-heroine at the core. You want to know about "all the evil" and you most certainly want Lisbeth to get her bloody justice.

(You don't want to know about the particular shade of her jacket. I'm just saying.)