Widely seen as a critical success, The Girl Who Played with Fire was also (according to The Bookseller magazine) the first and only translated novel to be number one in the UK hardback chart.
Nils Bjurman, who had previously raped Salander, focuses his attention on capturing her and destroying the film she made of his crime.
Mikael Blomkvist, the publisher of Millennium magazine, who had lost contact with Salander since her absence, sees her being attacked by a member of the Svavelsjö outlaw motorcycle club.
Millennium is approached by Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson, who have put together a report concerning sex trafficking in Sweden and the abuse of underage girls by high-ranking figures.
Eager to clear Salander's name and realizing that she has hacked into his notebook computer, Blomkvist leaves her notes on his desktop; her replies point him to "Zala".
By coincidence, two members of the motorcycle club, Carl-Magnus Lundin (Salander's attacker) and Sonny Nieminen, have been dispatched to burn the place down.
With information from Björck and Palmgren, Blomkvist pieces together the entire story: Zalachenko is a former Soviet defector whose very existence is kept classified by Säpo.
Between Blomkvist's testimony, Salander's various character witnesses, and the additional suspects piling up, the police are forced to admit that their original suspicions were wrong.
"[4] On the November/December 2009 issue of Bookmarks, the book received a (4.0 out of 5) with the critical summary saying, "By most accounts, the follow-up to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is as successful a second installment in a crime series as we’re likely to see".
"[7] Boyd Tonkin in The Independent said: "the spiky and sassy Lisbeth Salander – punkish wild child, traumatised survivor of the 'care' system, sexual adventurer and computer hacker of genius" was "the most original heroine to emerge in crime fiction for many years".
[8] Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times wrote that "Salander and Blomkvist, transcend their genre and insinuate themselves in the reader’s mind through their oddball individuality, their professional competence and, surprisingly, their emotional vulnerability.
[10][11] In the first part of the book, Salander is exploring Dimensions in Mathematics apparently written by L. C. Parnault and published by Harvard University Press in 1999.