The Girl Who Played with Fire

The novel is, in some ways, a continuation of the previous book.
This time the protagonist is the girl, Lisbeth Salander.
The opening is slow and leisurely.
Lisbeth, now immensely wealthy, lives in the Caribbean and later returns to Sweden, where she resumes a relationship with an old friend and reconnects with her former guardian, hospitalized after a stroke.
The journalist, on the other hand, is involved in an investigation into sexual exploitation, conducted by a couple—a university researcher and a journalist.
Meanwhile, Lisbeth’s new guardian, a depraved lawyer, seeks revenge against the girl, who holds him in her grip with video footage showing him raping her, and thus enlists a gang of criminals.
At this point, the novel takes on a more intense rhythm: the lawyer is murdered with the same gun used that same night to assassinate the university researcher and her cohabiting journalist partner.
Lisbeth is accused, dredging up the old narrative of the girl’s psychological instability.
The entire country is drawn into the hunt for her, whom both the mass media and the police depict as a psychopath.
It is evident that the truth is entirely different: the girl had been branded a psychopath (and consequently first committed to an asylum and later placed under guardianship) because she was the daughter of a notorious Russian spy who had defected to Sweden.
The girl’s father was in fact—he, truly—a violent psychopath, and he is behind the murders out of fear that the truth will be exposed.
A series of adventures ensues, but in the end the girl is saved, this time, by her journalist friend:

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The themes of sex and sexual violence against women remain the central subjects of the book.
Added to these are two others, which gain prominence as the novel unfolds: on the one hand, a corrupt and superficial police apparatus; on the other, child social services, which often operate according to conventional formulas and under pressure from psychologists and experts who are themselves corrupt and dominated by obsessions and stereotypes.
Lisbeth was a victim not only of the secret services, who wanted to institutionalize her to avoid complications in managing an inconvenient figure, as her father was, but she also suffers from the entrenched attitudes of the social welfare system, which views «outsiders» as a threat to social cohesion, irrespective of their intelligence and fundamental honesty.
It is the antisocial individual who causes disturbance and must somehow be removed.
The book is weighed down by too many «digressions» and characters relative to the central plot; at times, the dialogue proves prolix and repetitive, just as certain narrative resolutions appear somewhat predictable and implausible: for instance, the police failing to examine the murdered journalist’s computer, the presence of a giant—incidentally the girl’s half-brother—who seems invincible because he cannot feel pain, yet is easily chained up by Blomkvist, and the girl’s survival, managing to save herself despite having been buried alive.