Now Salander is back in The Girl Who Played With Fire in an even more central role. This time she is less detective than quarry, as she becomes the chief suspect in three murders ...it boasts an intricate, puzzlelike story line that attests to Mr. Larsson’s improved plotting abilities, a story line that simultaneously moves backward into Salander’s traumatic past, even as it accelerates toward its startling and violent conclusion ...Mr. Larsson builds suspense, while tracking the progress of several simultaneous investigations...precise, reportorial descriptions with lurid melodramatics lifted straight from the stock horror and thriller cupboard ... The ending of The Girl Who Played With Fire — like the revelation about Salander’s past, which gives the book its title — comes straight out of a horror movie: it’s gory, harrowing and operatically over the top.
Readers of Dragon Tattoo will not be surprised to learn that Salander is indeed still withdrawn and irascible — and also highly effective as a computer snoop ... Yet Salander is a rather different person from the brilliant but touchy Goth of Dragon Tattoo ... The Swedish title of Dragon Tattoo is Men Who Hate Women. That motif runs through the new novel like a slushy undercurrent, all the more disturbing in light of Sweden's aforementioned sexual liberalism ... 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.
While The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo read like a Nordic Silence of the Lambs, its dynamic, brawny sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire, reanimates the tropes of the political thriller ... Like spaghetti westerns, les superproductions of Luc Besson and Mathieu Kassovitz, and British chanteuses from Dusty to Duffy, Larsson's work demonstrates how American popular culture has colonized European art. Especially cinema. The author stages action sequences with the zest of a Hollywood filmmaker...a thriller with moral freight ...buzzes with ideas; even amid the carnage of the Grand Guignol finale, it fizzes with fury. And while Reg Keeland's flat translation preserves folds of fat...it ably indicts a system that empowers the empowered.
Sequels are rarely as good as the originals and The Girl Who Played With Fire is no exception. Salander is still in fine form, but the structural strengths of Tattoo have gotten flabby. It takes the better part of 200 pages for the lengthy story, centering on the Swedish sex trade, to take off ... Still, Larsson is too good a writer to make things dull. If it isn’t the page-turner that the original was, it at least has enough elements to keep things inching forward ... And when Salander reenters the story and starts hacking and kicking and shooting and tazing, things get hot again. She makes Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mrs. Peel from The Avengers look like Henry James characters ... She’s also, though, an incredibly moral person and the way Larsson squares the various parts of her personality is the best part of the book.
The Girl Who Played With Fire, as long and as good as the original, follows Blomkvist and Salander, now no longer working together, as they try to expose corruption, solve murders and settle a few personal scores ...this novel makes it very clear that it is Salander, with her astonishing Internet investigations, who is the real post-modern incarnation of A. Conan Doyle's eccentric genius. She's brave. She's smart. She's even physically strong ... Indeed, it seems clear that Larsson is, in a playful way, associating Salander with another mythic character, Agent 007 ... Larsson has given his readers the ingredients for a heady literary cocktail.
If you've finished Tattoo, then nothing is going to dissuade you from picking up Volume 2 of Larsson's Millennium Trilogy ... Bit by bit, the story of Salander's unspeakably abusive childhood is unearthed, and everyone — Blomkvist, the police, the readers, even Salander — comes to understand how her character — fearless, wild, withdrawn, crude, moral — was forged ... As absorbing as it is, yet Fire falls short of Tattoo. For one, the novelty of a thriller set in modern-day Sweden has worn off ... Then too, the villains are more familiar ... There is more than a little authorial laziness. The connections between Salander's past and the crimes that Blomkvist's magazine is exposing strain credulity ... And yet, I couldn't put down The Girl Who Played With Fire and eagerly await book three.
Like Thomas Hardy with his Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Larsson makes the reader love and worry about his heroine as though she were real. It's almost unnerving. You want to befriend her ... In Tattoo, the reader met Salander when she and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist solved a decades-old murder. In Fire, you come to understand her ... Fire is a more coherently plotted tale than Tattoo. Although a terrific read, Tattoo's ending hurriedly jumbled together serial killers and secret Nazis. But to fully enjoy Fire, you must read Tattoo first ... Larsson clearly loved his brave misfit Lisbeth. And so will you.
Prickly and intensely private, the petite, tattooed title character introduced in Stieg Larsson's first novel, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is also definitely not someone you want to cross ... Now, in The Girl Who Played With Fire, there's a whole new set of ignition points to deal with ... Paths cross when the writer producing the story is murdered and Lisbeth's fingerprints are found on the murder weapon. She disappears, and Mikael desperately tries to find her to help ... As with the first book, Larsson weaves a taut, multifaceted, pulse-pounding dark tale that keeps producing surprises to the end.
Lisbeth Salander is back, and more righteous than ever ...in this second installment of his Millennium trilogy, Lisbeth is clearly 'the woman who hates men who hate women' ... In The Girl Who Played With Fire, Larsson at last gives readers a full accounting of how Lisbeth has been shaped by her tragic past, when 'All the Evil' happened. He skillfully shows her emotional growth as she faces the responsibilities required of friendship ... Larsson has also narrowed the scope of this novel. There are no Madoff-like global economic scandals competing with Lisbeth's very personal predicament ...Larsson steadily builds the tension until it's nearly impossible to put this book down. When you do, don't worry.
If The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was amazing, then The Girl Who Played with Fire is astonishing, perfect in every conceivable way ... Blomkvist’s life violently intersects with Salander’s again when Salander unexpectedly, though not inexplicably, becomes the primary suspect in a triple murder, the victims of which are the freelancing couple, as well as a third party who played a prominent role in The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo; all of them are connected in some way to Salander ... A lesser or intellectually lazier author would have leaned on him more, having spent all sorts of blood, sweat, toil and tears creating him to start with. Not Larsson. He instead populated The Girl Who Played with Fire with a new group of unforgettable characters, including a number from Salander’s past, not the least of whom is Zala ... Its 500-plus pages have the detail of a thousand, but you’ll read them with the speed and intensity of a short story.
Tangled but worthy follow-up to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008), also starring journo extraordinaire Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the Lara Crofts of the land of the midnight sun ... The late Larsson’s sequel does not absolutely require knowledge of its predecessor, but it helps, given the convoluted back story and the allusive, sometimes loopy structure of the present book ... Some of the traditional elements of the espionage thriller turn up in Larsson’s pages, while others are turned on their head—sometimes literally, at least where the romantic bits come in ... Fans of postmodern mystery will revel in Larsson’s latest.
