Category: General

The Girl Who Played With Fire – a review

On By TomIn General, Insight, Novel

This is the second story in the Millenium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson and for me was an even more impressive piece of storytelling than the first, ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’.

Sweden - featuring Stockholm at east side (bulge at bottom right)

For this review I’ve decided on two graphics; a map of Sweden which gives a clear idea of how much access there is to it’s border’s from land and sea, followed by a map of Europe to define more clearly where Sweden is situated on the continent.

The story highlights the sex trafficking trade along with the peripheral violence, blackmail, degradation, and intrigue that are associated with such a despicable practice.  Millenium magazine features once again and Mikael Blomkvist, investigative journalist is at the centre of the action as he agrees to assist in the publishing of a book which will expose high ranking officials, police officers and others who are involved with the logistics of the trafficking, or the abuse of the ‘imported’ women themselves.

The author of the book is murdered as is his girlfriend and also the legal guardian of Lisbeth Salander (The Girl).  A weapon is found which connects the murders and a fingerprint connects Lisbeth to the weapon.  She disappears as a national hunt is mounted to arrest her for the triple murder.  The authorities are quickly convinced that it is a straightforward mulitple murder and set out to capture their prime suspect, but alongside the police investigation the team at Millenium magazine set up their own investigation based on the information in the soon to be published book.  Mikael Blomkvist discovers along the way some things he never knew about Lisbeth.  Whilst avoiding capture, Lisbeth conducts her investigations in her own inimitable fashion with sometimes humorous and other times disturbing results.

Europe - featuring Sweden (green section at top centre)

Once again Mr. Larsson gradually introduces a seemingly endless cast of characters, but as previously the key people in the story are larger than life and stand out easily from the crowd.  Like the first in the series I found this story hugely entertaining and I now look forward to reading the third and final part, ‘The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest’.

An Ongoing Task

On By TomIn Competitions, General, Insight, Novel, Poetry1 Comment

My graphic is of the Forth Road Bridge which amongst other things is famous because when the team of painters complete the job from one side to the other, they start all over again.  I’m quite proud of this photo because I took it whilst on holiday and I found that there aren’t that many vantage points to capture this view.  This is looking north across the River Forth, northwest of Edinburgh.  Forth Road Bridge, Scotland

Chapters 1 and 2 of my HAWK story have been completed and in the hands of the competition judges for a couple of weeks now and within 48 hours of sending my efforts away I was working on the revised Chapter 3.  The first draft of Chapter 3 is now completed and I’m on my way with some notes for Chapter 4.  I enjoyed the experience of producing the HAWK series in poetry because it was written very much one step at a time without much planning.  I then went on to tackle the NaNoWriMo Challenge in November 2011 using the same character and a fresh story idea.  For the NaNo it was fun tackling the task and seeing the renewed story take shape but this new version is a different sort of thing again.

Since the rewrite of the early chapters I’ve now got my novelist’s head on and even before the present chapter is completed I’m thinking of and making notes for future chapters.  I’ve finally discovered something that other people have talked about in the past, whereby the story, or the characters seem to help the writer.  I find myself trying to argue why a character would or wouldn’t say or do a certain thing.  What I have accepted is that as I complete one chapter I’ll be straight on with writing the next.  My books on gangs, criminal investigation and police organisation will now come into their own.

Today I downloaded ‘The Girl Who Played With Fire’ by Stieg Larsson onto my Kindle 3G, but when I’ll be making time to read it I don’t know.  One of my aims for today was to check out other blogs, and there may not be many I read but I do owe it to the people concerned.

I haven’t written much poetry recently and today I had the urge so I put a verse together titled, ‘All I Want To Do ….’, which surprise, surprise is about writing.  No change there then.