6 reviews for The Girl Who Played With Fire
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The Girl Who Played With Fire
by Steig Larsson
Description:
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 Salanderthe 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.
About The Author
Karl Stig-Erland “Stieg” Larsson (15 August 1954 9 November 2004) was a Swedish journalist and writer. He is best known for writing the Millennium trilogy of crime novels, which were published posthumously and adapted as motion pictures. Larsson lived much of his life in Stockholm and worked there in the field of journalism and as an independent researcher of right-wing extremism.
He was the second best-selling author in the world for 2008, behind Khaled Hosseini. The third novel in the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, became the most sold book in the United States in 2010, according to Publishers Weekly. By March 2015, his series had sold 80 million copies worldwide.
Skryf Review
“Excellent Reading”
Abbas
In the second of his three volume series (well, at least it was three until Larsson’s heirs hired someone to make a fourth from his notes) centered on the remarkable researcher and hacker Lisbeth Salandar and journalist Mikael Blomkvist, Larsson has delivered a totally engrossing page-turner. About to publish a book that reveals many dirty secrets concerning the international sex trade in Sweden, Blomkvist is caught up in a deadly race for the truth when his two authors are murdered and Salandar is accused of the crime. Larsson touches on corruption at all levels in this tale of women used and abused, treated like any other imported illegal product and powerless to protest. From low level johns to misogynist cops, from dark psychologists to supersecret intelligence agencies, many layers of Swedish society come under Larsson’s microscope.
Navya
I have this really funny picture in my head of Stieg Larsson having had a list mounted on the wall of his office, and I can just see him going down and checking off one by one as he just verbally decimates every single political idea/government corruption/way of life he despises. I know that is a very silly idea, but it doesn’t change the fact that every cause he is passionate about shows through brilliantly in his writing. He has a way of making you feel exactly as he does, it is brilliant.This book is more personal then the first, since it revolves around Lisbeth Salander. While the mystery of the Vangers in the first book was terribly engrossing and I couldn’t wait to find out what happened…this one is almost physically painful. I had to know what was happening, and I inhaled this book. His plot has so many twists and turns, every time you think you have enough information to form a theory he throws something else in the pot and your own mental calculations have to start over. He never lets you catch up to the story until the very end.Now that we’ve cracked a chunk of the mystery behind Salander
pankti
Like the first book, this was a complete investigation-kind-of-book. But unlike the first one, this has nothing to do with third parties, and everything to do with Lisbeth. It’s a more personal book, and it cements the core of this series, which is Lisbeth. There are lots of new information about Lisbeth, and she becomes somewhat less enigmatic as we begin to get a glimpse at the troublesome, dark past. Surprisingly, there’s less Blomkvist in this than the first book. Although, he’s still a prime character to the story, he takes the role of the secondary character rather than the first one, as we saw him in the first book. In the entirety of the book, Blomkvist and Salander hardly ever meet. So, summing everything up, I’ll admit that I liked this better than the first because of the more personal storyline the author followed.
Vishvesh
This long book is the second in the Millennium Trilogy, the first of which, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, introduced the reader to Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, a campaigning journalist. It is a very exciting read, and I’m eager to read the final volume.THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE is in some senses two books. The first 200 pages is an extensive prologue telling the story of Lisbeth, previously a tantalisingly insubstantial figure: we learn quite a lot of her back-story, as some of the previous hints about her past are filled in (including a rather gruesome prologue chapter). At the same time, we learn that she has been travelling the world since the end of the first book, arriving in Grenada at the start of this one, where she has a brief affair, witnesses an attempted murder during a freak tornado, and sets out to solve Fermat’s last theorem without the aid of a computer program. The rest of the book – in itself a hefty 400 pages, shifts to Sweden and ignores most of the Grenadan events. Perhaps some of them will be picked up in book three. Otherwise, I’m not sure of their point.Although there is a resolution of sorts, there are a great many loose ends. It remains to be seen whether the third book will address these, in particular the mystery of Lisbeth’s sister as well as the wider issues of the corruption of the Swedish “special services” and of the sex/drug trade. As things stand, we are left on a cliffhanger, with little closure in the characters’ life-stories or on the wider issues that were being addressed by two of the murdered people. A perfect recipe for a third, and final, instalment.
Jasmine
In the first book of the series, the story was at least as much about Mikael Blomkvist as it was about Lisbeth Salandar, the actual girl with the dragon tattoo. She is a fascinating character, and a lot of hints are dropped about her life, but we don’t learn much other than that she is a genius with computers, a great researcher, fearless, socially inept, and that she had a very troubled childhood and young adulthood.In The Girl Who Played with Fire, Salander is right in the middle of everything, accused of murdering three people: the lawyer assigned to be her guardian by the government and two journalists who were working on a story and book for Mikael Blomkvist’s magazine, Millennium, about the importing of girls for the purpose of prostitution.Another way in which Larsson showed his great skill as a writer was in depicting every character in a completely believable way, whether that character is a police officer, a prize fighter, or a lesbian writer and performer who sometimes shares Salander’s bed.Is Salander guilty? And if not, who is? The book is full of intrigue and mystery, action and one astonishing revelation after another. Once again, you will be enthralled, and once again, you will find it very hard to put this book down until you finish it.