The second in Stieg Larsson’s trilogy. The Girl Who Played with Fire picks up a few years after Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist last teamed up to solve the mystery surrounding the dissapearance of Harriet Vanger.
This book starts digging into Lisbeth Salander’s past and her relationship, or lack thereof with her father. The story starts off right where The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo left off, Salander is on the beach in the Caribbean keeping tabs on her guardian Nils Bjurman from a distance. After being gone for more than a year, she heads back to Sweden and learns that Bjurman is trying to plan his revenge against her.
Before she knows it, Salander is the lead suspect in the double murder of two of Mikael Blomkvists friends. Coincidently the murder victims were just about to publish an article on the sex trade in Sweden, involving several high ranking police officers and members of the government in Sweden. The question now becomes, did Lisbeth murder these two? If not, who is setting her up and why?….and who is the mysterious Zala that kept coming up in the articles research?
The rest of the story revolves around Salander trying to escape capture from the authorities, her criminal father and all the henchmen hired to find her. All the while Blomkvist is preparing to move forward with publishing the incriminating story and trying to help clear Salander’s name.
The Girl Who Played with Fire is a much faster story than the previous thriller. While both are exciting, this story starts to answer many questions about Salander and her past, explaining why she is the person that we read about in the previous book. It also leads in perfectly for the third and final book in this trilogy. If you haven’t read this yet, get started. If you haven’t read the first book in the series, go pick it up now. You won’t be sorry.
