The Girl Who Played with Fire The Girl Who Played with Fire The Girl Who Played with Fire () is the second novel in the best-selling "Millennium" series by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. It was published posthumously in Swedish in 2006 and in English in January 2009. The book features many of the characters who appeared in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (2005), among them the title character, Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant computer hacker and social misfit, and Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of "Millennium " magazine. Widely seen as a critical success, "The Girl Who Played with Fire" was also (according to
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo writes, "His favourite targets are violence against women, the incompetence and cowardice of investigative journalists, the moral bankruptcy of big capital and the virulent strain of Nazism still festering away ... in Swedish society." Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm and Anna Westerstahl Stenport write that the novel "reflects—implicitly and explicitly—gaps between rhetoric and practice in Swedish policy and public discourse about complex relations between welfare state retrenchment, neoliberal corporate and economic practices, and politicised gender construction. The novel, according to one article, endorses a pragmatic acceptance of a neoliberal world order that is delocalized, dehumanized and misogynistic." Alm and Stenport add, "What