The Girl Who Played with Fire is the second novel in the Millennium Trilogy written by Stieg Larsson. The Girl Who Played with Fire starts a year after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Lisbeth Salander returns to Sweden, she calls her court-appointed guardian to remind him that he needs to submit satisfactory reports on her behavior. Mikael Blomkvist continues to work as an editor of Millenium magazine and he is about to publish a story about prostitution and trafficking in women from Eastern Europe. When the two journalists who were working on the story are found dead, the police encounter Lisbeth’s fingerprints on the crime scene. Mikael who believes that Lisbeth is innocent begins investigating the crime, ultimately discovering secrets from her past.
When Larson was 15-years-old he witnessed three men gang-rape a girl named Lisbeth. Days later, he felt shame for not helping her, he begged for forgiveness, but she did not accept it. The event haunted him for years and inspired him to create the character of Lisbeth Salander, who was also a rape survivor. The accuracy of this story is unknown since a close colleague of Larson said that he overheard the story and retold it as his own. In one interview he did, he mentions that he imagined Pippi Longstocking as if she were a punk-rock adult.
Stieg Larsson died on November 9, 2004, in Stockholm, he was 50-years-old, of a heart attack after climbing seven flights of stairs to his office, because the elevator was not working. Soon after his death, manuscripts of three completed novels were discovered. He never intended to publish them, but these were later published posthumously as the Millennium series.
The Swedish adaptation of The Girl Who Played with Fire premiered on September 18, 2009. Directed by Daniel Alfredson, starring Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace, playing the role of Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander.
