The Girl Who Played With Fire (2006)

I'm still not sure what I think about the Stieg Larsson trilogy after reading this. I'm not even sure when I'm going to read the third one, though I expect I will eventually. I see how by constructing a narrative of some nearly 2,000 pages and keeping it together with a good deal of complexity and yet with an essentially simple story at its base—the romance between Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander, I am presuming—Larsson really did pull off something remarkable. That said, this does feel to me like a bit of a placeholder and there mostly for the exposition, thus a decided momentum killer. The most interesting part to me was the first 200 pages or so, with Lisbeth traveling around and eventually setting up a new identity and life for herself in Stockholm. Once the plot kicks in—the triple murder that Lisbeth finds herself accused of, and all the efforts to track down the killer and/or clear her name—it felt to me like it lost a good deal of steam. Larsson is remarkably artful in the way he elides the murder, following his characters right up to the point it happens and picking up immediately after, in order to keep us guessing. But it's fairly stale bait. In general, he is very good at structuring, moving nimbly from one character to another, one scene to another. There are small cliffhangers along the way, but more often it's a matter of smoothly pivoting from one to the next. Also, as others have noted, he is masterful at making the mundane interesting. Who knew that a diet heavy on apples and Billy's Pan Pizza (whatever that is) could be so compelling? Even so, the complaint I registered after the first novel (and, before that, with the first movie in the Swedish TV trilogy ... the only version I have seen), is Lisbeth's status as a kind of de facto superhero. I'm not entirely comfortable with the outsize exaggerated here, which crops up with more than just Lisbeth (for example, the invulnerable giant, Ronald Niedermann), but is most evident with her. This seems to be another version of Tom/Joey from A History of Violence, in terms of her raw physical capability. She's tiny but she routinely kicks ass (sometimes literally)—even defies death here, a gunshot to the head and buried alive (I did like how Niedermann was afraid of her and ran away). I can see that's as intended, for effect, but still. Some general believability issues going on here.