The Girl Who Played with Fire

Description

Part blistering espionage thriller, part riveting police procedural, and part piercing exposé on social injustice, this second book in the Millennium series is a masterful, endlessly satisfying novel.

Mikael Blomkvist, crusading publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation. On the eve of its publication, the two reporters responsible for the article are murdered, and the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to his friend, the troubled genius hacker Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist, convinced of Salander’s innocence, plunges into an investigation. Meanwhile, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous game of cat and mouse, which forces her to face her dark past.

Reviews

“The Girl Who Played with Fire will likely confirm Larsson’s position as the most successful crime novelist in the world.” -Slate

“Larsson has bottled lightning . . . Formally at least, The Girl Who Played with Fire is a muscle car. But a European engine purrs beneath its hood . . . It buzzes with ideas [and] fizzes with fury.” -Los Angeles Times

“A dynamite thriller.” -Liz Smith, Variety

“These books grabbed me and kept me reading with eyes wide open with the same force as the best of the series on the TV monitor . . . Move over, Tony Soprano . . . Blomkvist is a wonderfully appealing character. And the girl of the title is one of the most fascinating characters in modern genre fiction.” -Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle

“Another gripping, stay-up-all-night read.” -Entertainment Weekly

“Lisbeth Salander [is] one of the most startling, engaging heroines in recent memory . . . Some of the books’ appeal comes from the Swedish setting, but most of it is a result of the author writing from the heart, not from a formula. Larsson clearly loved his brave misfit Lisbeth. And so will you.” -USA Today

“The Girl Who Played with Fire confirms the impression left by Dragon Tattoo. Here is a writer with two skills useful in entertaining readers royally: creating characters who are complex, believable, and appealing even when they act against their own best interest; and parceling out information in a consistently enthralling way.” -Washington Post

“Lisbeth Salander was one of the most original and memorable heroines to surface in a recent thriller: picture Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft endowed with Mr. Spock’s intense braininess and Scarlett O’Hara’s spunky instinct for survival . . . Now Salander is back in an even more central role . . . The reason it works is the same reason that Dragon Tattoo worked: Salander and Blomkvist transcend their genre and insinuate themselves in the reader’s mind through their oddball individuality, their professional competence and, surprisingly, their emotional vulnerability.” -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Author Biography

Stieg Larsson, who lived in Sweden, was the editor in chief of the magazine Expo and a leading expert on antidemocratic, right-wing extremist, and Nazi organizations. He died in 2004, shortly after delivering the manuscripts for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.