The Girl Who Played With Fire

I liked this one a lot better than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The perspective is less detached and you really get involved in the characters in a good way, especially Salander. Like the last, things are extremely slow to get off the ground, nearly three hundred pages before you get to the point in the book summary, but once you're there things really take off.

That said, this book is ridiculous. Ridiculous. The bad guys are almost cartoonish, our heroine is not only a genius but suddenly has super powers, the police are complete idiots, and the misogyny and ableism is at such mouth-frothing exaggerated (dear god, I hope its exaggerated) levels that its hard to not throw the book across the room. Sometimes it feels like really really long fan fiction.

And unfortunately, my interest started wane towards the end, as suspenseful as Larsson tried to make it. A lot of the major points, like who is responsible for the murders the story surrounds, are kind of thrown out unceremoniously, pretty much exemplifying the point the focus of these books is not the solving of murders but to watch Lisbeth Salander be awesome. Which isn't so bad, but jesus after 700 pages I would've liked a little bit more of a pay off.