The Girl Who Played With Fire is the second book in Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy." In this book, the publisher of Millennium Magazine, Mikael Blomkvist, is set to publish a book about the Swedish sex trade when the book's author is killed. His one time researcher, Lisbeth Salander (the girl in the title) seems to be involved, but is she? And if she's involved, why on Earth would she kill the author and his girlfriend? The book then sees Salander and Blomkvist independently try and find out who's responsible.

It isn't a bad book, but I wasn't all that convinced by Stockholm's "grimmy underbelly" as described by Larson. If you read a Rebus book, for example, you get the sense that Rankin knows a little bit about Edinburgh's crime. Having read this book, I really didn't get that same sense from Larson. As an example, many of the gang leaders are described as "stupid" in the book. They might be uneducated. You might not like them. But that doesn't mean they're stupid. It is that sort of gross over-simplification of the "baddies" that irritated me. Part of me thinks Larson wants there to be "black hats" and "white knights," with the "black hats" being some thing less in some way. In my experience, they often aren't and that made the book "less" in some way.

In addition, there's a twist in the tail that's telegraphed a mile off, so don't think you'll not be able to work out what might be at the core of this from the start either.