The Girl Who Played With Fire-Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Played With Fire
Stieg Larsson
Knopf, Jul 28 2009, $25.95
ISBN: 9780307269980

Swedish Millennium magazine publisher and reporter Mikael Blomkvist is considering an exposé of the extensive sex trafficking trade in Eastern Europe. He knows the article will cause a stink in Sweden when the elite are exposed as participants. However, just before the release of the damaging report, the lead journalists are murdered and the evidence including fingerprints on the weapon point to Lisbeth Salander.

With an outraged cry from the media and the government, some of whom headline the dead reporters’ sex trafficking article, to hunt down this vicious killer, Salander knows she must put aside her beach reading of Fermat to uncover the real culprit. Blomkvist knows the tattooed Salander is innocent and using his investigative skills as a crusader he also begins making inquiries.

The second Blomkvist and Salander Swedish thriller is a super whodunit that brilliantly combines action-packed sequences with cerebral treatises. The story line is fast-paced from the opening salvo and never slows down even when the heroine discusses mathematical theories as Blomkvist and Salander independently and united investigate the homicides with neither expecting the trail to take them to her past though their previous combined inquiry (see THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO) should have warned them.

Harriet Klausner