The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson; trans. by Reg Keeland

Imagine a typical Russian novel, loaded with characters and subplots, romance and deception; add brutality and suspense, some high-tech thrills, and enough surprises to keep the reader guessing—usually incorrectly—and you will have The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second of three crime novels written by Stieg Larsson. A Swedish writer and journalist, Larsson apparently wrote three thrillers, one after the other, and dropped off them at his publisher’s just prior to his untimely death at age fifty. Like its predecessor in this Millennium Trilogy, the huge international bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, this new novel is on the long side, but so engrossing that you won’t want to turn out the light and go to sleep.

As in the first book, the main characters are Mikael Blomkvist, a forty-ish, crusading journalist (who sounds a lot like Larsson,) and Lisbeth Salander, a young security expert and genius computer hacker. This time around Blomkvist is working with a freelance writer named Svensson who has written an article about sex trafficking that Blomkvist wants to publish in his magazine. The article is based on research Svensson’s girlfriend did for a book she is writing. When Svensson and his girlfriend are murdered, Salander’s fingerprints are found on the murder weapon and she becomes the number one suspect and the subject of a nationwide search. Convinced of Salander’s innocence, Blomkvist is determined to find the actual killer and, in the process, clear her name and, hopefully, reconcile with Salander who left the country in a jealous huff at the end of the first book.

The pace of The Girl Who Played With Fire, and, not surprisingly, the reader’s interest, increase markedly as the book goes along, and the second half is really quite exciting. Larsson does this by packing the book with activity. For example, there are four separate investigations into the murders that move in different directions and often do not know what the others are doing or what they know. Larsson follows each closely and, cleverly, jumps quickly from one investigation to the other, using short, punchy sentences and occasionally going back in time. All of which combine to create a real sense of wonder and anticipation. The plot itself is a convoluted puzzle that challenges the sharpest reader. The action is heightened, too, by the sheer number of characters, each of whom has a distinct story that Larsson explains in some detail, so that the reader does not know until near the end who did what and why.

But the main reason to read this book is Lisbeth Salander, who is far and away the most interesting and fully realized character in the book. It is unusual to find a female fictional character as tough, smart, and emotionally damaged as she is. We constantly root for her success as we marvel at her exploits which include hacking into computer systems worldwide, seemingly as easy for her as it would be for you or me to turn on the TV, going about in disguise completely unnoticed, and using her ferocious determination to overcome her enemies. What does Blomkvist know about Salander? Hardly anything.

She had a photographic memory and she was a supreme hacker. He knew that she was a peculiar, introverted woman who did not like to talk about herself, and that she had absolutely no trust in authority of any kind.

She could be viciously violent. He owed his life to that.

Salander has a highly developed, but idiosyncratic, sense of right and wrong, and will stop at almost nothing to prevent or punish the perpetrator of what she considers an injustice. In rescuing a woman who is being attacked by her husband on a beach during a storm at the beginning of the book:

[Salander] was almost bowled over by the furious gusts, but she clenched her teeth and worked her way forward, step by step into the storm. She had almost reached the couple when one more flash of lightning lit up the beach and she saw Geraldine Forbes sink to her knees by the water’s edge. Forbes [Geraldine’s husband] stood over her, his arm raised to strike her with what looked like an iron pipe in his hand. She saw his arm move in an arc towards his wife’s head. Geraldine stopped struggling.

Forbes never saw Salander coming.

She cracked the chair leg over the back of his head and he fell forward on to his face.

As compelling as much of The Girl Who Played With Fire is, it would have benefited from a good edit. The beginning drags as Larsson sets the stage—the murders don’t occur until nearly two hundred pages into the book. At times Larsson includes too much detail, such as two pages itemizing what Salander bought at Ikea for her new apartment. Finally, in a fit of excess to prove to the reader how smart Salander is, Larsson tells us that she has become so fascinated by Fermat’s Last Theorem that she is thinking about it even as she stakes out the lonely farmhouse in which her mortal enemy is hiding. “All of a sudden she understood. The answer was so disarmingly simple. A game with numbers that lined up and then fell into place in a simple formula that was most similar to a rebus,” Salander says to herself, outsmarting the world’s best mathematicians.

While Larsson does not rank with the best crime writers, like Henning Mankell and Ian Rankin, The Girl Who Played With Fire is a tough, smart, action-packed thriller that is well worth reading. I am eager to read the third and final book, and to see the film versions that are certain to follow.

Reviewed by Stan Izen

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson; trans. by Reg Keeland
Alfred E. Knopf, 2009
Cloth, 512 pp, $25.95