The Girl Who Played with Fire

Lisbeth Salander is the focus of Stieg Larsson's second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire. For two years, Salander has travelled the world on Weinerstrom's billions, and Mikael Blomkvist has wondered why she cut him off cold. Blomkvist and his partners in Millenium have taken on a freelance journalist who is investigating the sex trafficking that is largely ignored in Sweden. Just before the expose is to be published, the freelance journalist and his girlfriend are found murder and the prints on the murder weapon belong to Salander, who has gone underground leaving hints for Blomkvist as he struggles to prove her innocent.
With three busy children and a job that starts at 7:00 a.m., I rarely read until 2:00 a.m anymore, but Larsson caught me. I couldn't put this novel down. Salander is so supremely clever with her own innate sense of morality and justice that she has become for me the ultimate outsider hero. Her sense of alienation in a bureaucratic world full of injustice, but more importantly pain and suffering of the innocent at the hands of the powerful, the cruel and the perverted, oddly enough, makes her an empathetic character. She would hate that. Blomkvist, on the other hand, is all that we imagine ourselves to be, the crusader against injustice, the journalist with integrity and morality fighting the bad guys. The characters are fascinating and the plot suspenseful, and I didn't figure it all out until the last minute. Unfortunately, I'm now waiting to see what happens to Lisbeth in the third installment. Tomorrow can't come soon enough.
A VERY adult book, Played with Fire, is a fascinating crime-social commentary novel that all crime fiction addicts will enjoy.