May Meetup: The Girl Who Played with Fire

Everyone liked The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo so much, we're reading the next in the series for our May meetup. Come for an evening of exciting conversation with some wonderful ladies.

Mikael Blomkvist, publisher of Millennium magazine, has made his living exposing the crooked and corrupt practices of establishment Swedish figures. So when a young journalist approaches him with a meticulously researched thesis about sex trafficking in Sweden and those in high office who abuse underage girls, Blomkvist immediately throws himself into the investigation.
He’s had no contact with tattooed wild-child and computer hacker extraordinaire Lisbeth Salander since they risked their lives on a terrifying hunt for a serial killer a year earlier (see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). But unknown to Blomkvist, Salander has had contact with him–or at least, with his computer hard drive, which she has cloned and is monitoring from the vast new apartment she has bought with her fraudulently obtained fortune.
Repeatedly abused while young, Salander is a traumatized survivor of a deranged psychotherapist who treated her as a child. A punk avenging angel with boxing skills, a photographic memory and pathologically focused on seeking out and punishing violent misogynists, Salander is drawn to the investigation on Blomkvist’s computer. So while Blomkvist and his fellow Millennium idealists research the sex industry according to the rules of good journalism, Salander–spurred on by the appalling case studies of teenage prostitution she finds on Blomkvist's computer–takes matters into her own hands. She plots punishment for the traffickers, but before she can carry out her own brand of justice, she is accused of three murders, all connected to the sex trafficking exposé about to be published in Millennium.
To avoid capture by the police, Salander vanishes. While the tabloids go wild at the idea of a “psychotic lesbian S&M Satanist” on the run, Blomkvist tries despairingly to clear her name, though he can’t find her anywhere. When he does eventually make contact, it is to discover that Salander is more embroiled in his investigation than he could have thought possible. It turns out that for Salander, the trail of guilt leads shockingly close to home.