The girl who played with fire by Stieg Larsson is the second in his bestselling trilogy after The girl with the dragon tattoo. It continues the adventures of Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander although this time the prominent roles are switched with Salander being the central character.

As with the first I found it a page turner and I think Larsson paces the book really well that brings the book first simmering and then to the boil. Salander begins to mature, calm down and grow up and then finds herself accused of a triple murder and her few friends come to her defense to prove her innocence.That’s essentially the story with a sub theme of exposing sex trafficking in Sweden.

TGWPWF doesn’t contain such lurching, disturbing and graphic sexual violence as the first book did, although it’s there under the surface, in the past of Salander and as motives for several characters. Having said that the book is fairly crude with plenty of mostly needless swearing chucked in.

The same reservations about the characters remain, Larsson seems to be at pains to point out that the main characters while appearing immoral are actually deeply moral but just according to their code and not that of a wider group. So Blomkvist and Berger can be loyal to one another while Berger carries on with her infidelity to her husband. All the characters hop in and out of bed with various others. Sex appears to be of great consequence and no consequence all at the same time and their sex lives are just one example of the skewed morals of the characters.

There are a number of other weaknesses of this second book, it’s a bit too full of product placement as if Larsson had a Hollywood film in mind. IKEA for starters must be delighted by this book. Salander is becoming a bit of a graphic book heroine with a growing list of super abilities. In the first book she was a brilliant hacker with a photographic memory and now we add mathematical genius, boxing and weapons expert who can’t be killed.

Larsson also seems to write himself into a corner, one of the bad guys is a massive muscle-bound man who feels no pain and can’t be beaten. Fortunately despite being a hardened criminal he’s a bit scared of the dark and runs away from Salander at a crucial moment. It gets a bit silly. Larsson writes, ‘She [Salander] could not grasp how she could still be on her feet.’ Well, precisely.

The ending is such that if you’ve any interest in the story at all then you’ll buy the third book as too many questions remain unanswered and unresolved. Overall this is a decent pulp fiction story and it’s easy to see how it captured the imagination, but there are better writers telling better stories.