Product Description

Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.

But he has no idea just how explosive the story will be until, on the eve of publication, the two investigating reporters are murdered. And even more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander—the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker who came to his aid in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and who now becomes the focus and fierce heart of The Girl Who Played with Fire.

As Blomkvist, alone in his belief in Salander’s innocence, plunges into an investigation of the slayings, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-28
• Released on: 2009-07-28
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 512 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307269980
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, July 2009: The girl with the dragon tattoo is back. Stieg Larsson's seething heroine, Lisbeth Salander, once again finds herself paired with journalist Mikael Blomkvist on the trail of a sinister criminal enterprise. Only this time, Lisbeth must return to the darkness of her own past (more specifically, an event coldly known as "All the Evil") if she is to stay one step ahead--and alive. The Girl Who Played with Fire is a break-out-in-a-cold-sweat thriller that crackles with stunning twists and dismisses any talk of a sophomore slump. Fans of Larsson's prior work will find even more to love here, and readers who do not find their hearts racing within the first five pages may want to confirm they still have a pulse. Expect healthy doses of murder, betrayal, and deceit, as well as enough espresso drinks to fuel downtown Seattle for months. --Dave Callanan

From Publishers Weekly
Fans of intelligent page-turners will be more than satisfied by Larsson's second thriller, even though it falls short of the high standard set by its predecessor, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which introduced crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist and punk hacker savant Lisbeth Salander. A few weeks before Dag Svensson, a freelance journalist, plans to publish a story that exposes important people involved in Sweden's sex trafficking business based on research conducted by his girlfriend, Mia Johansson, a criminologist and gender studies scholar, the couple are shot to death in their Stockholm apartment. Salander, who has a history of violent tendencies, becomes the prime suspect after the police find her fingerprints on the murder weapon. While Blomkvist strives to clear Salander of the crime, some far-fetched twists help ensure her survival. Powerful prose and intriguing lead characters will carry most readers along. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle Oddly enough, Lisbeth Salander was not at the center of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," Stieg Larsson's long, complex, thoroughly absorbing thriller published in the United States last year. Despite sporting the beastly tattoo, Salander played second banana to journalist Mikael Blomkvist as he solved a decades-old mystery involving a missing member of a wealthy Swedish family. As if to make up for that slight, early in this sequel, "The Girl Who Played With Fire," Salander's name and photo appear in newspapers all over Sweden -- and not for her greater glory. Evidence places her at the scenes of three killings, and the gun used in two of them bears her fingerprints. The accompanying news stories portray her as an eccentric loner if not a nut case. 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. As she dons disguises and changes apartments and eludes the police, she has her old colleague and lover, Blomkvist, on her side, but given his tendency to fool around with other women, she refuses to have anything to do with him. (A well-meaning chap who simply capitalizes on Sweden's famously permissive attitude toward carnal pleasure, Blomkvist can't understand why Salander avoids him.) Yet Salander is a rather different person from the brilliant but touchy Goth of "Dragon Tattoo." She is seasoned by a recent trip around the world. She has been phasing out her tattoos and piercings, partly because ostentation can be a spoiler for a private investigator and partly because they don't mean much to her anymore. And she is systematically becoming better acquainted with a subject for which she has always had a flair: higher mathematics. Besides putting her freedom in jeopardy, then, being fingered as a triple murderer threatens to reverse months of personal growth. While looking into the crimes for which she is wanted, Salander again demonstrates her formidable computer-hacking skills. One of her best shows comes when she needs to "borrow" a car; targeting the parking garage of a company where she used to work, she reprograms its surveillance system from afar. "Between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. [the cameras] would show a repeat of the previous half-hour, but with an altered time code." Guess who will be on hand to do what in that "missing" half-hour. Those who know the young woman well take her prowess into account. Consider Nils Erik Bjurman, the guardian she reports to as a condition for staying out of the mental hospital to which she was once committed. Bjurman raped her in the first book, only to be punished by Salander herself, who caught him by surprise, tied him up and gave him a humiliating, homemade tattoo. Aware that she can read his computer's mind, the odious guardian is careful not to leave any cybertrace of his plan to have her taken out by a hit man. Even so, Bjurman comes to a bad end. Salander's estranged lover, Blomkvist, is craftier. Well aware that he can't keep Salander from breaking into his computer, he entices her to think better of him by creating a folder into which he stuffs whatever he learns about the ongoing murder investigation, along with his assurances that he believes in her innocence. In other words, he asks to be hacked. Slowly, in some of the novel's most dramatic sections, Salander begins to come around, and the pair tiptoe toward a reconciliation. 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. If contempt for women is widespread in a country where love is all around, the reader might wonder, what help is there for societies still enmeshed in puritanism? "The Girl Who Played With Fire" confirms the impression left by "Dragon Tattoo." 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. The sharp-eyed may catch Larsson leaning on coincidence a bit too often in the new book, but overall his storytelling is so assured that he can get away with these peccadilloes. Less forgivable, perhaps, is a climactic episode that seems too obviously contrived to make readers gasp. Stieg Larsson died in 2004, at age 50, after a heart attack, leaving three completed novels featuring Blomkvist and Salander (and rumor has it that part of a fourth was found in his computer). It's a shame that Larsson was taken from us so soon, but it's a gift that before his time ran out he managed to produce at least two first-rate thrillers, and perhaps three. We'll know for sure next year, when the last book is scheduled to appear in English.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

"Salander alone against the world"
In THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, the second volume in the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, publisher Mikael Blomkvist and the police are conducting parallel investigations into three horrifying murders -- and their initial evidence points straight at young computer genius and social misfit Lisbeth Salander. Kalle Bastard Blomkvist (as Salander has begun referring to him) hasn't seen Salander in nearly two years, except for one night when he happened to witness a huge man attempting to kidnap her and both she and the attacker eluded him. He's bewildered about why she cut him off cold, but had accepted her decision -- until now. He doesn't believe Salander killed these victims. Well, at least not two of them. He has to contact her, find out how she's become embroiled in this, and help her. Salander, as usual, has her own ideas about who she'll see and when....

In THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, Larsson partnered Blomkvist and Salander as they unraveled a twisted tale of corporate greed, Fascist connections, and perverse sex and violence. FIRE highlights another subject on which Larsson wanted to shine light, namely the underbelly of the sex trade, a swill of human misery being forcibly imposed for money and simple loathing of women. Blomkvist's magazine, Millennium, plans an issue devoted to the subject based on the interviews and reporting of a criminologist and a journalist, and there follows much in-house discussion of the lurid material and how it should be presented to the public. But the three murders turn the magazine and its people on their heads.

Meanwhile, Salander travels, changes her appearance, and matures in the early chapters of the 569-page book that covers four months in total and is told in four parts. Among her pursuits: attempting to proof Fermat's Last Theorem in a way Fermat himself might have done, furnishing her new abode, and keeping tabs on Bjurman (whom, recall, she memorably tattooed in DRAGON). Then, she disappears for quite a spell as the murder investigation gets cranking, and finally, she regains the spotlight as the book rushes headlong into a heart-stopping denouement.

The last book in this series -- tentatively entitled THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST in its English translation -- is not scheduled for release until 2010. However, the entire trilogy has already been published in Swedish (naturally), French, and German. Larsson reportedly had planned a ten-volume series. He had written part of the fourth book and had outlined volumes five, six, and seven. Sadly, due to his early death, only the trilogy is complete and will, according to his father, be published. After reading FIRE, the thought creeps in that perhaps the trilogy will not provide closure, and that the reader could be left dangling, unsatisfied. That would be a crying shame because Salander and Blomkvist -- along with other continuing characters -- do burrow themselves deeply into the reader's (at least this reader's) affections. Fortunately, reviewers who have read, in the other aforementioned languages, the entire story arc, including the final novel, seem generally very satisfied. Some claim that the last book, also the longest, is a grand finale that answers all outstanding questions. A few are less effusive, stating that the last book can't meet the anticipatory heights set by the stunning, unusual first one.

This last criticism can be applied to the second book as well. FIRE does not pack quite the punch of uniqueness that DRAGON did. One can perhaps think of the movie trilogy THE MATRIX, MATRIX RELOADED, and THE MATRIX REVOLUTION as an analogy. The smash introductory film awed with its mind-bending perspective. The second and third passes were very solid, even amazing, partners, but they only reiterated the cutting-edge magic so novel in The MATRIX, building on it, not inventing something mind-blowingly fresh. Familiarity takes a bit of the bloom off the rose, but it certainly doesn't breed contempt in these instances. Larsson's FIRE lags a little during the mid-section in which criminal investigation procedure grinds along and the author belabors certain points, seeming to believe his readers novices at crime mysteries. But overall, FIRE accelerates the enthralling story of Lisbeth and Mikael with panache. One can't help thinking the world they inhabit is too slimy, too vicious, but Larsson was a man with many crusades and causes, and his trilogy vividly paints the harsh pictures of society that he hoped to reform. The Millennium Trilogy encompasses uncompromising social critique; prickling thrills; and curious, bittersweet romance. FIRE drew me like a moth, and I can't wait to get my hands on HORNET. 4.4 stars.

Highly entertaining ... slightly flawed.
I found this book to be a solid sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in fact, I may have liked it ever better than the first.

In this book we learn more about Salander. Skillfully exposed throughout the course of the novel, bits and pieces of her background appear until by the end a full picture has emerged. Some statisfying, some not so satisfying. A couple points easily guessed early on.

She's a fascinating character, and the parts about her were my favorite in the book, (even the parts that were seemingly plot irrelevant and never resolved). She's a smart, strong, flawed underdog, and you can't help rooting for her.

This book tackles a lot of topics. Sex trade, the media, police corruption, authority abuse, on and on. I like it because it keeps it interesting, but sometimes it was all over the board. Especially interesting to me is learning more about Swedish culture throughout the course of the book.

What's best about the book is the pace. It kept me captivated throughout the 569 pages (in my copy), and I couldn't go to bed until I finished. It's a well-done thriller.

Incidentally, I didn't find that you needed to have read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo first, but certainly that would be preferable.

Looking forward to the 3rd, and sad that it will be the last. This is a really interesting series.

'...Dragon' on Amphetamines
This is the follow up to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I suggest you read that one first, though this novel is reasonably self-contained.

This book opens with Lisbeth Salander enjoying her newly ripped of wealth lazing in a hotel in Granada. No one knows where she is (as usual), and back in Sweden, Millenium magazine are preparing a an expose of the sex slave business in Sweden. The journalist who is preparing the expose is murdered, along with his partner, and Salander's legal guardian. Salander, now back in Sweden is the prime suspect, and the police hunt is on.

To say things get complicated from this point is an understatement. There are multiple investigations (Salander's of course, the police and Millenium's), multiple suspects, more murders, red herrings galore, and just general mayhem. Dark as all this is, it is actually quite funny in places: the police have no idea at all what is going on, despite a well meaning and competant detective in charge.

This is all tremendous fun for the reader. It is as anything remotely boring (and probably realism suffers) has been left out, yet despite the novels sheer page turning ability, (I read this too fast, I will need to read it again), it still has the power to inform.

So buy it, read it once, and then read it again.