Monday, July 27, 2009

Tuesday Tomorrow

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
Published by: Knopf
Publication Date: July 28th, 2009
Format: Hardcover, 512 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.

But he has no idea just how explosive the story will be until, on the eve of publication, the two investigating reporters are murdered. And even more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander—the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker who came to his aid in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and who now becomes the focus and fierce heart of The Girl Who Played with Fire.

As Blomkvist, alone in his belief in Salander’s innocence, plunges into an investigation of the slayings, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all."

While I have not yet read Larsson's debut, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (having only gotten my hands on a copy this week in anticipation of the sequel, thanks Mom), I have been very interested if only because of the circumstances surrounding these novels. Stieg Larsson was a journalist from Sweden. He was a political activist, photographer and editor of several sci-fi fanzines. When he died of a massive heart attack at the age of 50, he was most likely going to be remembered for founding the Swedish Expo Foundation, similar to the British Searchlight Foundation, established to "expose racist and totalitarian organizations and tendencies." But he died with a secret. He was journalist who happened to be a novelist in his spare time. Writing for his own pleasure, at the time of his death in 2004, he had written three completed novels, a partial draft of a fourth, and the outlines for the fifth and sixth in the eventual ten volume series. The Millennium Series has been sweeping the world by storm. This little known journalist has become a literary sensation posthumously, winning awards left, right and center. His first book, published last year in the US under the title The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, originally titled, Men Who Hate Women, was a huge success, and the books sequel is sure to be equally successful. The third and final completed book in the series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, will be out in October in the UK. A US publication date and title has yet to be set. Look for my review of the first Millennium book hopefully in the not too distant future.

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