The Girl Who Played With Fire - Stieg Larsson

International Edition Book Cover

The second part of Stieg Larsson’s international best seller Millennium Trilogy is all it could be expected of. It’s a mystery thriller that takes a turn on crime suspense while enveloping the story with secret agencies and sex trafficking. The Girl Who Played with Fire is the pinnacle of Larsson’s posthumous master piece trilogy thriller.

The main characters are essentially the same with many others added to the scene as the story progresses. The novel opens with the Girl, Lisbeth Salander enjoying a yearlong holiday along the Caribbean, meeting new people in her own peculiar way and pondering over Ferment’s equation. Back home in Stockholm, Mikael Blomkvist is working with a freelancer Dag Svensson and a criminologist Mia Johansson to publish a shattering story on sex trafficking involving the very people responsible for law making-and-abiding for the same. Salander returns home and things take a sour turn when Dag and Mia are murdered and Salander gets implicated for the murders.

On one hand, Blomkvist, though haven’t been in touch with Lisbeth for over a year, is sure of her innocence and tries to help her out. On the other hand, Lisbeth tries to handle the matter, as one would expect, in a mysterious manner, while the police, a group of sneaky and unscrupulous Swedish Intelligence SIS and Lisbeth continue to chase her dark past, all in a maddening race of hide and seek.

Stieg Larsson has done a tremendous job of keeping the story coherent and gripping despite the plot's many facets. The ever increasing number of characters in the novel does not make it confusing, rather increasingly gripping. Larsson’s narration is no doubt worth the accolades he has won and his description is very finely detailed but very finely interesting too. He has a charming way of doing what a novelist can do at best with his story; making it look real.

It couldn’t have been more gripping and more spine tingling than Larsson has made it. The Girl Who Played with Fire is one of those books you wouldn’t want to put it down till it ends and once it is finished, you keep wishing for more. A really hot read for sure!

Also read the reviews of the prequel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the sequel to this book, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Totally gripping, totally hot!