The Return of Lisabeth Salander

Thankfully book sequels work better than movie sequels. Movie sequels are often cynical and half-baked attempts to cash in a successful movie, and nobody, the directors, writers or actors give a damn about credibility as long as they cash in.

Not true for books, at least not as much. Good writers treat their characters like their children, and would not subject them to the half-assed, hack-style treatment moviemakers do.

"The Girl Who Played  With Fire" is a good case in point. A sequel to "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" Stieg Larsson lets us meet back up with his characters, and although he puts them through even more unimaginable horror than he did in Tattoo, they are their usual dysfunctional selves, working another murder mystery.

Karl Blomqvist returns, and he is on another big story, not his own, but instead that of a young freelancer on the sex trade. Lisabeth Salander is travelling the world, enjoying the money she made of the Wennerstrom affair, and appears to be slwoly becoming a happier, less dysfunctional person than before. Some murders come up where the evidence is tied to Salander. The police, organized crime, and Blomqvist all set out to look for Salander, who does an excellent job of disaapearing from everyone. Slowly but surely the noose tightens, and that is where the book takes off.

Salander is more the main character here, and we see her slowly maturing from the angry punk she was before. She disappears for nearly half the book, leaving the reader and her most ardent supporters, Blomqvist included, to wonder about her innocence. While all this is going on, we learn everyone's point of view except Salander's. You even wonder if she has turned from the protagonist into the villain;

.Blomqvist is more or less the same guy. For personal and professional reasons, he looks for Salander, and trying to figure out the chain of events. There is also the police, led by Inspector Bublanski who try to slove the case and are split up with each other as to who the suspect is and what his/her motives are.

Larsson has you seriously guessing. Main characters are credible suspects, there are different motives of all involved, and there are a few red herrings thrown in for good measure. There are various threads to the story, but it rarely meanders, and does not lose focus. He toys with the reader throughout, and the reader is the better for it.