Book Review: The Girl Who Played With Fire

Back in March, I reviewed the first book of the Stieg Larrson Millennium Trilogy books, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Well, I finally got around to reading the second book and it was just as good if not better than the first.

The second book, The Girl Who Played With Fire, is centered around the same characters as were in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, as is the third book, which I haven’t started yet. I had the same problem with this second book as I did with the first – it took me a long time to get engrossed in the story. Both of these books are extremely detailed and the author takes many pages to get the reader acquainted with the scenery and what all is going on in the lives of the characters before anything interesting and suspenseful starts to happen. However, just as with the first book, once the plot starts moving forward, it moves forward rapidly and you will not want to stop reading because you are so anxious to know what is going to happen next.

Once again, this book is set in Sweden, although some of the first scenes in the book are set on an island in the Caribbean as one of the central characters, Salander, is there getting away from it all. Once Salander returns to Sweden is when the action starts to take place; well, a while after she returns anyway, there’s still a lot of detail to read before anything truly exciting happens.

This book deals with a triple murder investigation and also human and sex trafficking. Are the two related? Well, you will just have to read the book to find out. One of the central characters in the series is accused of the triple murders but whether or not she did it is a question that won’t be answered for many, many pages. There are a ton of plot twists and turns that will leave you scratching your head and wondering what the heck is going on. At one point, I even said out loud, “Well, I certainly didn’t see that coming.”

If you have some time on your hands this fall and have not yet delved in to this book series, I would highly recommend it. Like I said, it will take a bit before the book will get interesting but once it grabs your attention, it will not let go. If you start it and think it’s boring, just keep reading is the only advice I can give. In fact, I let a lady a church borrow the first book (and have since given her the second) and she kept saying how boring it was and I said, “Just keep reading, Martha, just keep reading.” I’m anxious to see her tonight to see if she heeded my advice.

One quick note, as mentioned this book deals with human and sex trafficking and as you may have already figured out the book is therefore loaded with lots of adult content. This is not a book for the weak of heart. There are a lot of graphic details in this novel just as there were in the first one, including scenes of homosexuality. I just wanted to put that warning out there before someone got the book and was shocked at the content. If you can trudge through all the graphic details, then this is really a great book.