'The Girl Who Played with Fire' by Stieg Larsson - Book Review

The Girl Who Played With Fire is the second book in Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy, picking up a year or so after the ending of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Larsson weaves another masterful web as Mikael Blomkvist tries to prove Lisbeth Salander is innocent in a triple murder. Surpassing his efforts in Dragon Tattoo, Larsson proves again how tragic his untimely death was for the literary world.

The Girl Who Played with Fire picks up about one year after the end of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, with Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist having gone their separate ways -- Blomkvist has rejuvenated his journalism career, and Salander has apparently fallen off the face of the earth. Their paths cross again soon enough, as Blomkvist finds himself thrust into a murder investigation of two friends and a third victim, with Salander the only suspect.

Larsson again takes his readers on a twisting maze of facts and half-truths. Anyone who read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo will find the meandering style familiar, but readers new to the story could easily get lost, as Larrsson gives some facts and history from his first book only a cursory mention. An interesting twist on the book's style comes when Salander disappears from the text for almost 150 pages, luring the reader deeper into the mystery around her involvement in the murders. By the time the novel abruptly ended, I instantly found myself wishing I could pick up the third in the series (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest is scheduled for a 2010 release in the US.)

I found The Girl Who Played With Fire a gripping mystery that was hard to put down. For readers of the previous book in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire should prove to be an even more entertaining read than Dragon Tattoo. For readers who are new to the series, the book will be an entertaining but somewhat difficult to follow read due to perceived gaps in the character development.