The Girl who Played with Fire
Adult Fiction; By Stieg Larsson (Millenium #2)
~ “She saw him drenched in gasoline. She could actually feel the box of matches in her hand. She heard the scraping sound of sulfur. She saw the match burst into flame.” – Lisbeth Salander ~
Letter Grade: A (85%)
Mikael and Lisbeth are yet again thrown into a dangerous plot a year or so after the events in Hedestad and The girl with the dragon tattoo. Mikael hires a journalist and a criminologist to write a story with the aim of exposing a sex trafficking scandal in Sweden. When the two are murdered in their own home, and when Lisbeth is the prime suspect, the world gets a whole lot more complicated for both Lisbeth and Mikael. Mikael must battles the press and the police in his swift defence of Lisbeth, who has not been heard of for over a year. And for the crime to be solved, Lisbeth must reveal the secrets of her dark past.
When I read The girl with the dragon tattoo, I was enamoured by how easy it was to read, despite having to do some side research about financial reporters and what fraud was all about. There was beautiful flow to the story, and a captivating – if not a bit bizarre – heroine in Lisbeth Salander. I felt I got to care even more about her in this story, and found a part of myself that cared for Mikael, Erika, Paolo, and Mirriam, as well. They were all part of fantastically vibrant scenes and epic climaxes that helped the plot along.
I want to get the little things I didn’t like about the book out of the way – it got a little long and descriptive toward the end, just like in the first book. Almost as if Stieg Larsson didn’t really know how to end each novel. Second, I was still having a little trouble understanding Lisbeth’s feelings toward Mikael. She mentioned “being in love” with him, but I didn’t think she actually knew what that meant. Third, I sometimes got confused by the sheer number of names (of johns and police officers) being thrown around as well as all the history. I wonder if I would have had some more ease with street names and all these people’s names had I been Swedish myself. And fourth, I found Mikael a little boring in the book, save for a few parts. He felt a little slow, if you will. I’m glad he found Lisbeth in the end, but I think I expected a little more character development. Or maybe that was just me feeling that his Swedish acting counterpart looked bored for 90% of the film.
The story itself was a gold mine – pretty much what I think readers had been waiting for since the first book. I’d had so many theories about Lisbeth from the beginning. First, her being the lost Harriet Vanger’s child, to her being the way she is because something had happened to her twin sister. I was really banking on the last one because I would have loved to see and hear Camilla in this book. Imagine the complexity it would add to plot and characters? However, when we got an inkling of the big villain in the book, I thought about the theory that Zala and Salander could not be coincidentally similar names. But I dismissed the thought and was still kind of shocked when I found that Lisbeth was Zala’s daughter.
I thought the focus on Zala, Ronald, and Lisbeth at the end of the book took away from the actual murders and the sex trafficking scandal. Maybe there will be a reprise in book 3? But man oh man, you get to feel for Lisbeth’s past with what happened to her mother, and what she did to Zala for revenge. It hit me in the gut when she was institutionalized because no one really believed her about the abuse her mother was being subject to at the hands of Alexander Zalachenko. So it was really nice to see the background of why Lisbeth doesn’t trust the courts and the authorities. Because it was a whole bit cover up for Zala the entire time. The fact that she was sent to St.Stefan’s so the Säpo police or whatever could cover up Zalachenko’s abuse and his presence was demonic. The fact that Bjurman (rot in hell) was involved from the start was mind-boggling and just made the book so much more addictive. The fact that Palmgren was alive and knew Lisbeth’s history, that there was a connection between Bjurman and Zala which made Zala enlist Ronald to kill Bjurman, Dag, and Mia….OH MY GOD.
P.S. It’s because of this aspect of the book that I literally recommended the series to my entire office 🙂
And man, oh man, I cannot forget Mirriam and Paolo’s part in all of this! They were both fantastic. When Paolo first came on the scene, I was very skeptical and suspicious (even going so far as to thinking that he was somehow Zala or even involved with him). But then he spoke with Erika and Mikael and I liked him a lot. And then the whole kidnapping scene happened where Paolo and Mirriam “tried” fighting the blonde giant Ronald Niedermann and barely escaped with their lives. It was seriously intense! Stieg Larsson sure knows how to write action-packed scenes!
But you guys can also imagine my amazement at the fact that we got THREE more intense a.f. scenes! First, with Lisbeth at Bjurman’s summer cabin with the two bikers. Spraying Mace and kicking some jerks in the balls never felt so good. Then, the scene where Lisbeth tries to catch Zala unawares at night at the farm but instead gets shot in the head. I seriously did think she was dead for a few pages. It was unnerving to even think that Mikael might have been the one to discover her body. BUT THEN, Lisbeth-fucking-Salander digs herself out of being buried alive and comes after her father with an axe that she lodges in his knee cap and basically falls unconscious as Mikael arrives on the scene. HOLY. SHIT. It made the scene where Bublanski arrested Hedström from Milton for leaking crime info to the press seem like child’s play.
P.S. The hand-holding scene and the Kalle fucking Blomkvist that Lisbeth utters as the last words of the novel were golden. I can only imagine Mikael’s relief at knowing she was safe after having broken into her Mosebacke apartment and having found the video of Bjurman sexually assaulting her.
Speaking of Bublanski…there was a whole dynamic between Bublanski, Ekström, Modig, and Faste in the investigation, and I thought it shed a lot of light on issues women face in 2018. First, that Faste was so despicably mysogynistic toward Modig and tried to get her off the investigation, accused her of leaking info to the press (when it was really Milton Security’s hired help Hedström). And that Modig had to explain herself to her supervisors for having slapped Faste in the face in her workplace, even with everything knowing how much of a despicable pig he was to everyone, especially toward Modig (and Salander).
There was so much satisfaction for both Lisbeth and Mikael throughout the book, it scares me to imagine what the final book in the trilogy will bring about. Mikael got justice for Dag and Mia, and tied Ronald the murderer up to a road sign for the police to catch him. And Lisbeth got her revenge when she attacked her father again. Hopefully, both Zala and Ronald will stay (and rot) in jail this time.
Early 21st century Sweden must have been an interesting time. One can only hope that people like Lisbeth and Mikael will always be there to save the day, and let the criminals rot in jail. The world has been blessed by having had Stieg Larsson write these books.
The impatience to get to the next one is real.
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