The Girl Who Played with Fire
Stieg Larsson, 2006
Mystery, thriller & crime Contemporary fiction
A hacker with a photographic memory returns from the Caribbean to a Sweden where a triple murder points at her. A cold Swedish crime story with a tender streak, moving between hacker detail, police procedure and sudden violence at a steady, deliberate pace.
Feels like tenderness. About death.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy Nordic crime, surveillance and hacker lore, and a heroine who keeps her own counsel. It is the second Millennium book, though, so the relationships and backstory land better if you have read the first.
Why read it
It gives you a tense, morally serious crime novel about state power, journalism and loyalty, with a heroine whose silence is as active as anyone else's speech.
A page from the book
Five seconds in which someone decides you are not there.
Three days later, he had taken the tunnelbana from Slussen to T-Centralen, and when the train stopped in Gamla Stan he looked out of the window and she was standing on the platform not two metres away. He caught sight of her at the exact moment the doors closed. For five seconds she stared right through him, as though he were nothing but air, before she turned and walked out of his field of vision as the train began to move. Stieg Larsson.Stieg Larsson was a Swedish investigative journalist and anti-fascist researcher; he wrote the Millennium trilogy in the evenings and died in 2004 before it was published.
Books that feel like this
More by Stieg Larsson
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson, 2005
A disgraced financial journalist and a furious young hacker are drawn into a forty-year-old disappearance on a snowbound Swedish island, where a rich family keeps its secrets.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest
Stieg Larsson, 2007
A wounded woman, an ER doctor counting minutes, and a journalist in handcuffs—a thriller about the machinery that protects secret power.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Girl Who Played with Fire for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy Nordic crime, surveillance and hacker lore, and a heroine who keeps her own counsel. It is the second Millennium book, though, so the relationships and backstory land better if you have read the first.
- What is The Girl Who Played with Fire like?
- A cold Swedish crime story with a tender streak, moving between hacker detail, police procedure and sudden violence at a steady, deliberate pace. Feels like tenderness. About death.
- What should I read after The Girl Who Played with Fire?
- If you liked The Girl Who Played with Fire, try The Coworker (Freida McFadden), Credence (Penelope Douglas) and The Pact (Jodi Picoult).
A taste of the feed
What it means when the most predictable person you know doesn't appear.
As strange as Dawn’s schedule is, it’s even stranger that today she isn’t following it. I can’t help but think that Dawn’s absence must signify something ominous. After all, Dawn is never late. Never.
The Coworker · Freida McFadden
When old neglect finds a fresh place to hurt.
I lock my jaw, swallowing the needles in my throat. Over all the years of nannies and boarding schools and summer camps where I was kept busy and raised by anyone but them, I’d found little pain in anything my parents did anymore. But it seems there are still parts of me to hurt.
Credence · Penelope Douglas
The problem with wanting everything to stay exactly as it is.
He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. "She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn’t figure out how to get from point A to point B.
The Pact · Jodi Picoult
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