2. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Steig Larsson

Somebody edited this one! I liked this book much more, for the readability factor if nothing else. The story was much more congruent and I was able to follow it without a lot of filler.

In this second book of the trilogy, the theme appears to be people taking the law into their own hands. There have been several murders and Lisbeth can be linked to all of them in some way or another.

Lisbeth, of course, mistrusts any authority figure, therefore she would never consider the cops to be on her side or any use to her. Mikael, being a journalist, is clearly justified in playing a police officer...wait, nope, he's just a journalist. I don't get it. Also, Dragan Armansky, who owns a security company full of rent-a-cops, also decides that he and his team need to get involved with the police investigation. It makes for an interesting story, but if you sit back and think about it, it seems pretty ridiculous that all of these people feel the need to "take the law into their own hands."

I found myself on Lisbeth's side in this book, more so than last time. She's pretty much front and center in the story, considering the fact that she's the prime suspect in three murders. In the last story I liked Mikael a lot, but his character wasn't developed at all in this story, so I found myself bored with his character doing the exact same thing he did in the last book.

This series is very dark, which I don't have a problem with, but it also feels very unpolished. Like Larsson didn't know who he wanted his characters to be. I will read the third installment (which costs twice as much, thank you very much Amazon.) because I want to stick it out to the bitter end but, Larsson's writing style-at least in his posthumously edited books-is definitely not for me.

Noelle