****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
How do you top a book that was excellently plotted, filled with memorable characters and an intriguing mystery? Apparently, by changing up the formula, filling out the already great characters with even more character and spinning a mystery that's more devilish, more immediate and more character-driven than before. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson created an excellent book that marked the beginning of a great author whose life was cut tragically short. The Girl Who Played with Fire cements his status as a premiere thriller writer. For those who haven't read the first book, beware because this review will obviously discuss the first book.At the end of Tattoo, our two characters Blomkvist and Salander have had a falling out and haven't spoken to each other. Meanwhile, Bjurman, the evil sadist who was a minor yet insidious character in Tattoo, is still fuming over Salander's way of getting back at him by branding him as the sadist he is and holding onto a tape documenting his evilness. The Girl Who Played with Fire starts out with a few different story strands like Tattoo. Also, like Tattoo these apparently divergent stories end up colliding in shocking ways. You have Salander's mysterious story, Bjurman's attempt to get rid of Salander on one hand. On the other, there's the Millennium paper side of things that is going to publish a book on sex trafficing that will expose a variety of members in Swedish culture as being a part of it. The stories converge in a shocking sequence of violence that propels the rest of the story forward.Unlike Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire's story is much more immediate and character driven. It delves more into Salander's character and answers many questions fans will have had when they finished the first book. It's also much better paced and written. One of the complaints I had about the first novel was that a lot of paragraphs had poor transitions into each other, making some sections feel more like vignettes than an interconnected story. Fire plays out much better and the transitions were much smoother. One area that tended to break my connection to the story were sometimes stupid characters. At times, characters do thinks that seem to be more for the sake of moving the plot forward than for anything realistic. Sometimes obvious clues are missed and other times the characters (particularly the police) seem completely ill suited for their jobs. That said, character development for Salander is front and center, this time, and her story is one with quite a few little twists and turns. Unlike Tattoo, where I figured out the central mystery pretty quickly into it, Fire surprised me multiple times in the direction it took. My recommendation is to know as little about the story as possible and just let it take you along its tumultuous journey.I was really surprised with The Girl Who Played with Fire. It upped the ante in terms of storytelling and pacing and presented some shocking situations that really sold me on Larsson's ability as an author. I also really enjoyed Larsson's framing of the story as an algebraic equation. Much like his use of statistics for the previous novel, Larsson uses an algebraic equation to introduce the sections and while it's not as obvious a connection as the stats, it becomes an ingenious framing device that sells the ending. Like Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire deals, once again, with Men Who Hate Women (as the Swedish original title indicates), but it tackles it in a larger purview. An excellent read and a startling critique on Swedish society, it is a powerful thriller and one I'd recommend without a single reservation.
