The Girl who Played With Fire

This is the second installment of the late Stieg Larsson's widely successful Millennium Trilogy. 

This time the story gets very personal.  We got to know more, way more, of our female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, which is of course a welcome diversion from the middle aged journalist Blomkvist who always got lucky with the ladies and is the main focus of the first installment.  We found out her past and her family and hence why she is what she is--such a certifiable and justifiable nutcase.  Salander might be strange with a capital S but at the same time she is just like every other girl we know.  When she got tons of money, what does she do?  She goes on a year-long vacation, buys an exquisite apartment and yes gets a boob job done by the best surgeon available in Genoa, Italy.  I am sure the girls can relate.  Larsson does most of the narratives in his own voice and there aren't that many dialogs, especially of Salander's because you know she is such an antisocial weirdo.  But sometimes we got lucky, didn't we?  On page 584 of the mass market paperback, we got to hear undistilled and unfiltered words pouring from her mouth, which are rare and at the same time exemplary of what she is.

"I've had a fucking miserable week and I'm in a fucking bad mood,"  she said.  "You know what the worst thing is?  Every time I turn around there's some fucking pile of shit with a beer belly in my way acting tough.  Now I'd like to leave.  So move your ass."

If there were ever a subtitle it could have been called "The Girl Who Hate Men Who Hate Women."

The book is more than 700 pages thick and Larsson, a master of story telling and suspense, just keeps his readers guessing and wanting for more.  It certainly is on par with the first one and it bests the first one especially if you are a bit tired of the whole serial killer genre and more into something like sex trafficking.  The book has an abrupt ending which only makes one want to read the third installment even more.