Popular Fiction and Bestsellers Book Suggestion for October 2009

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Summary: Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government. On the eve of publication, the two reporters responsible for the story are brutally murdered. But perhaps more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander. Now, as Blomkvist, alone in his belief in her innocence, plunges into his own investigation of the slayings, Salander is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all.

Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In our review of the late Larsson's first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008), we commented that the charismatic computer hacker Lisbeth Salander stole the show from her costar, journalist Mikail Blomkvist. In the second of Larsson's three novels, Salander and Blomkvist return, but this time the focus is mainly on Salander, and thank God for that! She is one of the most compelling characters to strut the crime-fiction stage in years, and it's a great shame that she will have such a short run. This time the plot begins, as did the previous book, with investigative journalism: Millennium, the magazine Blomkvist publishes, is about to do a story exposing the Swedish sex-trafficking trade when the authors of the story are both murdered, and Salander's fingerprints are found on the gun. Larsson jumps between Blomkvist's attempts to investigate the murder (and, he hopes, prove Salander's innocence) and Salander's own efforts to tie the killings to her past. It is that backstory that drives the novel: a ward of the state after being institutionalized as a teenager, following the day when All the Evil occurred, Salander has fought through a lifetime of abuse, familial and institutional, surviving through iron will and piercing intelligence. Whether those qualities will see her through yet again remains in doubt, even beyond the last page of this suspenseful, remarkably moving novel. Salander is one of those characters who come along only rarely in fiction: a complete original, larger than life yet firmly grounded in realistic detail, utterly independent yet at her core a wounded and frightened child. This is the best Scandinavian novel to be published in the U.S. since Smilla's Sense of Snow.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2009 Booklist