Meet Lisbeth Salander, a Swede. She is 26 years old, stands 4-feet-11, weighs less than 90 pounds. Multiple piercings and tattoos. Is a superhacker and gets by as a freelance investigator for Milton Security. Sleeps with men and women, as it suits her. Dresses in black. Knows martial arts. Has a photographic memory. Is a ward of the state and has a guardian. She has at least one secret identify.

And she can react with shocking violence when provoked. Seriously. Do not piss her off. She is dynamite in a tiny package.

Lisbeth came to light in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. In that book, she first met Blomkvist, the disgraced journalist and publisher of Millennium, a muckraking magazine. They were hired to discover the fate of a girl who disappeared nearly 40 years ago. They also go after a crooked financier. The revelations were horrifically perverse, the ending violent. Rate these books a hard R.

The Girl Who Played with Fire starts out about a year after the conclusion of events in Tattoo. Blomkvist is back at the helm of his magazine in Stockholm. He and his staff are working with a freelance journalist and his wife on an expose of sex trafficking in Sweden and the story is going to name names, including cops, judges, politicians, etc., who make money importing prostitutes from the Baltic states. On the side, Blomkvist is still conducting his not-very-secret love affair with his editor-in-chief, Berger, who is married to someone else.

For her part, Lisbeth is island-hopping in the Caribbean, spending her stolen fortune (see earlier book). She has a little adventure involving a hurricane and a wife-beater. I'll leave it at that, but the scene is a taste of what she's capable of. She returns to Stockholm and checks in on her guardian, a detestable lawyer who hates and fears her, who she is keeping on a short leash with information that would put him in jail if revealed. She rents a luxurious apartment (under her secret identity) and begins stocking it with furniture. She hooks up with an old pal, a lesbian, to show off her new breast implants (Lisbeth was really flat-chested before).

All is just fine until one night the freelance writer and his wife are murdered in their apartment. Across town, Lisbeth's guardian is also found murdered. All were shot with the same gun, which is found immediately. It has Lisbeth's fingerprints on it. Her photo is on the front page of every newspaper in Sweden the next day. She is a target for the whole nation.

At this point, the novelist does something risky. Lisbeth disappears from the novel for about 100 pages. Three separate investigations get under way -- the police, Millennium magazine and Milton Security. A lot of characters crowd into the novel, including cops (both honest and crooked), reporters, private investigators, motorcycle outlaws, mental health professionals, even a boxing instructor. Nearly all of them, of course, have Swedish names. American readers might have trouble keeping track (ou might want mark pages to refer back to if you forget who someone is).

It's a thrilling moment when Lisbeth resurfaces, sending Blomkvist a dramatic email. They begin parallel investigations. Lisbeth is roaming Stockholm in disguise. She escapes trap after trap. Her lesbian friend is kidnapped, leading to a smashing (literally) rescue scene. In an incredibly cinematic scene, Lisbeth gets cornered by two armed and hulking motorcycle outlaws. It becomes evident there are people who really, really hate her. The book races to a conclusion that has Lisbeth, at one point, gun in one pocket and Taser in another, leaving mayhem in her wake as she blisters down the highway on a stolen Harley.

Dismaying revelations about Lisbeth's upbringing emerge during all this and the reader comes to realize that deep inside this ruthless and fearless young female warrior is a once-frightened and badly damaged little girl.

A word of WARNING: I liked this better than Tattoo, which has more complexity but less adrenaline. Also, less of Lisbeth. But Fire contains a MAJOR SPOILER to the first novel. Highly recommended you read Tattoo first.

The book is seamlessly translated into English. One oddity, though -- The spelling is British ("criticise," "programme"), but vehicle velocity is in miles per hour, which is American.

As those reading these posts know, Larrson died after completing only three in the Millennium books. The third and final novel has already caused a sensation in Europe, but has not yet been published in English. I may have to learn Swedish.

Coffee. Lots of coffee. Must be a Swedish thing.

The ending is a total cliffhanger. From what I understand, the third book begins at the very moment this novel ends.