The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

189 pages of boredom followed by 314 pages of page-turning excitement. What’s up with that? Stieg Larsson appears to be quite the international writing sensation for his Millenium trilogy of crime books. At some level, I don’t entirely get it. On the one hand, I love certain aspects of his books, but on the other hand, some aspects of his books leave me cold. Punk rock, lesbian, Satanist, computer hacker Lisbeth Salander and publishing bad-boy Mikael Blomqvist are back in The Girl Who Played With Fire. This time they’re trying to get to the bottom of an international prostitution ring. But I swear, almost nothing of interest happens for 189 pages. I’ll give Larsson the benefit of the doubt and suggest that over the first third of the book he has effectively laid down the groundwork for the final acts, because on page 190 things turn on a dime and get damned exciting. I really hard a hard time putting the book down. Conversely, I had a pretty hard time picking it up until that point. I imagine I’ll read the third installment, but I’ll definitely be hoping that he has finally written a book that is scintillating throughout.

Here's what I had to say about the first installment.