THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE by Steig Larsson

This is the second book in a series called Millenium.  I read the first (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) some months ago, and enjoyed it.  At that time I learned how Stieg Larsson wrote his three books and then died before he knew that they sold some three million copies.
	I also enjoyed The Girl who Played with Fire.  It is an accomplished thriller cum mystery novel.  The characters are well drawn and the plot is just sufficiently complicated to keep you guessing, but not so complicated that you give up and let it all wash over you without trying to work it out.  As the advertising blurb repeatedly points out, the stand-out character in this and the previous book is the quirky heroine Lisbeth Salander who……well, I won’t give away secrets here.
	However, I don’t subscribe to the notion that these are the best thrillers written since sliced bread.  I had a few criticisms.  The start of the book has quite a long section with Lisbeth Salander on holiday, but none of what happens there has any bearing on the main plot of the book.  I think most of it should have been edited out.  One of the main characters isn’t even introduced until half way through the book – he seems to have been created specifically to weld part of the plot together, and it doesn’t quite work for me.  And at the start of the book, our heroine Lisbeth is obsessed with Fermat’s last theorem.  Towards the end she appears to have solved it, but I suspect that subsequent trauma at the hands of the bad guys has caused her to forget the solution.  In my opinion this should also have been edited out – the idea that someone with no mathematics training could read up a few books, scribble a few lines and solve Fermat’s Last Theorem is ludicrous.
	Still, who am I to say?  Millions of copies sold, and I have to admit that in spite of these criticisms, I still enjoyed it, and plan to get the third book in the trilogy when it comes out.
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