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A couple of days ago, I did a grand disservice to Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I sandwiched a review of the book into the middle of a social commentary on whether Blacks read White books. Honestly, who gives a damn? I know what I do give a damn about though, the Larsson Trilogy. While I am a bit late in reading the books, I am finally worked my way to the third book in the series, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. I shouldn’t say worked because it is my own fascination with Larsson’s narrative that has driven me to read the first two in one week.
While the first book The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has the potential to stand on its own, The Girl Who Played With Fire is a traditional cliffhanger, mystery novel. What remains non-traditional is the depth and detail that Larsson crafts his texts with. Fire brings us back into the world of cyberpunk Lisbeth Salander and publisher Mykael Blomvkist. In the first text the complicated relationship between the two is dealt with in a closely drawn plot structure that forces the two together while solving the case in Hedestad. In the second novel, the regular storyline of returning to a person’s surroundings and things going back to the way they were is established but not in a way that feels routine. Blomvkist has been catapulted to ‘stardom’ by his book on the Wennerstrom Affair and the magazine Millineum is benefitting from the shine of its star.
Within the text though is a new narrative that has been generated by a Blomvkist clone who comes to work at the magazine on an expose that attacks the sex trade in Sweden. The expose is the backdrop to the history of Lisbeth Salander who has decided to remove all contact with Blomvkist and her old world. She has taken off for a ‘world’ tour to break free from her old life. It helps that her skills as a hacker have allowed her to come into great wealth that is a direct result of her work as a researcher on Blomvkist’s Wennerstrom affair.
The writing is well paced once again and grabs the reader by introducing several characters. These characters are truly characters, a boxer, a blond 6-6 beast and a crippled shadowy villain named Zala. Salander is forced into a corner by an accusation of triple homicide and the novel moves quickly into a number of scenarios that climax in an isolated confrontation between several of the new characters, Blomvkist and of course Salander.
The ending sheds light on a number of plot points but also carries over into the third and final novel. Larsson, who died shortly after completing and submitting the trilogy is a master craftsman of fiction and Lisbeth Salander may be one of the most compelling characters brought to life in the mystery genre.
