The past two summers I’ve read one book from Stieg Larsson’s best-selling trilogy. And I must say, they do make good page-turning summer reads. This second one is focused much more on Lisbeth Salander, the computer hacker tough girl who helped journalist Mikael Bloomkvist crack the crimes in the first book. From that, she’s gotten rich off the Wennerstrom money and goes traveling around the world without telling anyone she knows. She even gets a boob job in Italy (in the book). But finds herself in trouble almost as soon as she returns to Stockholm — when her fingerprints are found on the gun at a multiple murder scene, leading her to go into hiding to figure out who’s behind it.
“The Girl Who Played With Fire” unlocks secrets behind Salander’s abusive childhood and how she came to be institutionalized for awhile. The murders, with a connection to Blomqvist’s Millennium magazine, deal with a loathsome gang of drug- and sex-traffickers. Like “Dragon Tattoo,” this book dwells on men’s violence toward women, which leads many readers to question is the sexual violence of these books just titillation and misogyny on the part of the author? Or is Salander a kind of feminist avenger? To which I’d say I’m more in the latter camp. Salander seems almost like an antihero superhero in the book, who has problems but confronts the bad guys and deals out justice in gutsy ways.
The Swedish movies follow the books pretty closely and do a good job. But they seem a bit more plodding than the fast-page-turning books. I liked both books almost equally well but perhaps found this one more suspenseful. The ending leaves Salander in a heap of a mess. All the more reason I’ll tune in next summer for the last book “Hornet’s Nest.”
