Review of The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Stieg Larsson, is even better than the first book, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The Girl Who Played With Fire is full of suspense and action. I read it compulsively because it kept me hooked, while the first one had a lot of slow parts. The villains are even more sinister than in the first, and the reader learns more about the enigmatic heroine, Lisbeth Salander. Though Lisbeth fits in to a character archetype of females especially prevalent in crime fiction that dates all the way back to Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare, and is not a unique character in many ways, she is appealing. She is strong, intelligent and independent. She rejects society because society has rejected her. She doesn't trust anyone because everyone has betrayed her. As a result, she's easy to relate to and sympathize with in this book. However, the other characters like Mikael Blomkvist aren't as developed in The Girl Who Played With Fire as they were in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, so they become less important to the reader. The novel overall doesn't suffer for this, though since Lisbeth is so fascinating. Also, The Girl Who Played With Fire taught me things about Swedish culture and history that I never knew before, like the fact that mace is illegal there and that there was a Swedish prime minister who was shot like Kennedy. These details immersed me further into Mikael and Lisbeth's world and gave the economy of the story credibility. However, there were many incidents that occurred that didn't seem plausible, so that poked a few holes in the economy of the story.
The Girl Who Played With Fire is an intense crime thriller that kept me on my toes and made me eager to read the next installment in the series.
Next I'll be reading Marked by P.C. and Kristin Cast.