A few blogs ago I waxed heartily about the wonderful novel by the late Stieg Larrson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

As promised, I’m back again after finishing the sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire. All I can say is: “Wow!”

If you thought I loved the first one, I zipped through this one and it was even better! This man was a master plotter, above all. The permutations he puts his girl, Lisbeth Salander through, are unbelievable, and yet in this world he has created, totally believable.

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This time Mikael Blomkvist, the intrepid investigative reporter, must clear Lisbeth of suspicion of three murders. We see the investigation from the police’s side of things, too.  The plot revolves around an international sex trafficking operation that Blomkvist’s magazine was readying to blow apart, with the double whammy of a dedicated magazine issue and a book, lies at the heart of the novel. But so does Salander’s dark past.  The two overlap in ways that define explanation without giving the plot away.

Suffice it to say that Salandar is the Swedish Bourne and Blomkvist is the Swedish Robin Hood. You won’t regret a minute of reading this novel. You won’t be able to put it down, either.