It didn’t take me long to get around to reading Stieg Larsson’s second book in his Millennium series, The Girl Who Played with Fire. It’s a long book at over 600 pages, and continues the story of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, revealing more of Salander’s history amidst a new, controversial and dangerous story that finds its way into Blomkvist’s hands.

If you liked the first book in this series, you will like this one.  It’s a good story, and keeps you turning the pages.  If you had problems with the first one, you will have problems with this one as well.  It suffers from the same stylistic and mechanical issues that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had.  It doesn’t seem like there was much editing done on the story, and there are a lot of details, minutia that probably could have been cut, without detracting from the story.  Point of view is still frustratingly inconsistent.  As a writer, it worries me that this book may be held up as the gold standard of how to write a best seller, and that it may lead to a decreasing editorial standard in publishing.

But for some reason, the mechanics work in this story.  Or at least they don’t overwhelm the story because the story is so good.  I kept reading almost the entire day Saturday, which is a rare thing for me to be able to do since I have two munchkins running around the house.

I haven’t bought the next book in this series yet, but I will, and probably soon.  I like the characters, and the locations are so well done that your really get immersed into the books.  You are there with the characters, and see the things happening to them so clearly.  Maybe that is because of the minutia.  I don’t know why the books work so well, but they do, and I look forward to reading the next one.