The Girl Who Played with Fire

The Girl Who Played with Fire is the second novel in the best-selling Millennium series by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. It was published posthumously in Swedish in 2006 and in English in January 2009. The book features many of the characters who appeared in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), among them the title character, Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant computer hacker and social misfit, and Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of Millennium magazine. Widely seen as a critical success, The Girl Who Played with Fire was also (according to The Bookseller magazine) the first and only translated novel to be number one in the UK hardback chart. Synopsis After a yearlong sojourn to Grenada, Lisbeth Salander uses three million laundered kronor to purchase a new apartment in Stockholm. She re-establishes contact with Dragan Armansky, her former boss at Milton Securities, and her former legal guardian Holger Palmgren. Nils Bjurman, who had previously raped Salander, focuses his attention on capturing her and destroying the film she made of his crime. Reviewing her medical records, he identifies a person from her past as his strongest ally. Mikael Blomkvist, the publisher of Millennium magazine, who had lost contact with Salander since her absence, sees her being attacked by a member of the Svavelsjö outlaw motorcycle club. He attempts to help, to Salander's astonishment, and their joint efforts enable her to elude her attacker.