The Girl who Played with Fire
By Stieg Larsson
MacLehose Press, £16.99, 569 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson died from a heart attack in 2004. He had just completed his “Millennium” trilogy of crime novels, which have posthumously become a global bestselling phenomenon.

The first instalment, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, introduced Larsson’s key characters: campaigning journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. In part two, The Girl who Played with Fire, Salander becomes the main investigator, working with Blomkvist to hunt down the dangerous figures behind a sex-trafficking network.

Readers of Dragon Tattoo will know Salander as the survivor of multiple abuses; more or less autistic, brilliant and bent on revenge. She seems an obvious descendant of Carol O’Connell’s Kathy Mallory, again a survivor of early childhood abuse who becomes a brilliant computer hacker, amoral and wildly brave.

It is almost impossible, meanwhile, not to see Blomkvist as a semi-autobiographical figure, if only in his activism and investigative journalism – Larsson was a committed campaigner again racist, right-wing groups in Sweden.

Salander’s hunt for the men who run the sex trade becomes part of her revenge on her own abusers and involves not only the uncovering of political corruption but also violence so explicit and extreme that it is almost farcical.

But in The Girl Who Played with Fire, Salander discovers and reveals a great deal about her past, making her both more appealing than she was before, and more convincing.

After a slowish start, this is a gripping novel, driven by a powerful mixture of anger and warmth. Some of the writing, however, reminded me of a comment in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: “Berger thought that the book was the best thing Blomkvist had ever written. It was uneven stylistically, and in places the writing was actually rather poor – there had been no time for any fine polishing ...”

If only there had been more time, not just for fine polishing but for more novels. Stieg Larsson was only 50 when he died.

Natasha Cooper is author of ‘A Poisoned Mind’ (Simon & Schuster)