(Quercus, $28.99)
Actually, for this week’s review, I started out reading Anita Shreve’s A Change in Altitude (Little, Brown, $38.99) about newlyweds whose marriage takes a tumble while they’re climbing ot Kenya in Africa. It’s good, standard Anita Shreve fare, but I confess I struggled to keep turning the pages. I guess I just wasn’t in the mood.
What I felt like was something good but not standard, and for once I knew exactly what that was – I sent the Ginger out to hunt and gather The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson.
This is the second in the trilogy by the writer who died before his books became worldwide bestsellers – a bummer for Stieg Larsson, but the fact they were published at all is a joy for all those who like a thriller with a Swedish twist.
In the first book of the series, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, journalist oikael Blomqvist hooks up with a damaged punk computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander – the tattooed girl of the title. Together they solve a missing person case, expose a wealthy family’s extremely dirty secret, and fall for each other.
In The Girl Who Played With Fire, Lisbeth has washed her hands of oikael but still hacks into his computer, which is how she finds out what he is working on and becomes tangled up in it, with tragic results.
For much of the book she is being hunted – by oikael, the police, her old employers and a bunch of assassins. As more details of Lisbeth’s awful early life emerge, it becomes easier to understand why she is so damaged, but also much easier to believe that she could be guilty of murder. Stieg Larsson is mindblowingly adept at winding different threads together, although at times a whiteboard to keep track of all the Swedish names might not go amiss.
Still, Lisbeth Salander, a tiny genius with fake boobs and Asperger’s syndrome, is a truly original heroine. I look forward to reading more about her in the third book of the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest.
**
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