The Girl Who Played With Fire

This post originally published August 3, 2010.

Author: Stieg Larsson
Series: Millennium series #2
Published: 2006
Publisher: Vintage
724 pages (paperback)
 
I’m trying something different here and instead of providing a summary and my thoughts separately, I’ll just do it all together (like many other book blogs seem to do).

This is the second book in Larsson’s Millennium series, and is my favourite one so far. I didn’t think the author could top his first book, but this one certainly raised the bar! The Girl Who Played With Fire is absolutely thrilling and an addictive read (and personally, better than the first one. It really kicked the plot up a notch!) In this installment, we get and in-depth look into Lisbeth Salander’s — the Girl featured in the series’ titles — life and many secrets are revealed to the reader to let us know why she is the way she is. She is by far the most mysterious and fascinating character in the series, and well, with this book, she becomes even more so.

This novel revolves around three murders, and unfortunately, our dear Lisbeth is the suspect because her fingerprints are found on the murder weapon. One victim is Bjurman, Lisbeth’s guardian, so the link is already established. The other two victims are a journalist and a criminologist, both of whom were working on a magazine article, a book (to be published by Millennium) and an academic paper on sex trafficking in Sweden. Lisbeth has no link to them and as far as anybody knows, doesn’t know them at all. Blomkvist, the other main character, the ‘crusading investigative journalist’, is absolutely convinced that Lisbeth did not murder the latter two, who are his friends. Unfortunately, the police are eager to paint Lisbeth the murderer and Lisbeth mysteriously vanished and cannot be found. The real mysterious part is that you, as the reader, aren’t even sure if Lisbeth is guilty or innocent or either! It drove me crazy not to know, because on one hand, she is very capable of killing people, but on the other hand, why would she kill people she doesn’t know? For a considerable chunk of the novel, you as the reader are left in just as much darkness as the other characters in the story.

The summary of the book was already enticing enough to me, but you will not believe how many unexpected twists and turns there are in this novel. They are good twists and turns, thank goodness, not things that are completely out of the blue and seem too strange to be true. I love being shocked like that in a novel, and this book does it successfully many times — in fact, one time I re-read a simple sentence over and over again, because I couldn’t help but think, “Oh my GOD, I can’t believe it!” And there is a lot more action in this novel, which makes this fast paced and gives the reader almost like an adrenaline-like rush as you go through the events. It is very addictive, I do not recommend reading it until you are sure you have a large amount of time available because this book sucks you in so well, you will have difficulty putting it down!

Lastly, the ending of this book ends in almost a cliff-hanger sort of way, which is agonizing for me because now I am desperate to read the next and final book in the trilogy!

My Rating: 5/5