Millennium Trilogy: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Played With Fire is the second novel in the best-selling Millennium series by Stieg Larsson.
The book The Girl Who Played With Fire features many of the characters that appeared in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, among them the title character, Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant computer hacker and social misfit, and Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of Millennium magazine.
The novel The Girl Who Played With Fire is formally divided into a prologue followed by four parts. The prologue of The Girl Who Played With Fire opens with a girl captured and restrained inside a dark room by an unidentified male. To cope with being captured, she mentally replays a past episode when she threw a milk carton filled with gasoline onto another man inside a car and tossed an ignited match onto him. Lisbeth Salander, after finishing the job on the Wennerström affair (described in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), disappeared from Sweden and traveled throughout Europe. The novel opens with Salander at the shores of the Caribbean in St. George's, the capital of Grenada. She has become interested in Fermat's Last Theorem and mathematics, an interest that resounds with the opening page of each Part in this novel. From within her room in her hotel she observes on several occasions that her neighbor, Dr. Forbes, an American tourist from Texas, physically abuses his wife next door to her room. (Summary by Wikipedia)

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest is the third and final novel in the best-selling Millennium series by Swedish writer Stieg LarssonThe novel The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest is the sequel to The Girl Who Played with Fire. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest was published posthumously in Swedish in 2007 and in English in the UK in October 2009.
The book The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest begins as Lisbeth Salander is flown to Sahlgrenska Hospital. It picks up where The Girl Who Played with Fire left off.
After surgery, Lisbeth Salander is moved to an intensive care ward under guard, accessible only to police, doctors, nurses, and her lawyer, Annika Giannini (who is also Mikael Blomkvist's sister). Zalachenko, whom Salander injured with an axe, is two rooms away. Niedermann is on the run from the police after murdering a police officer and carjacking and kidnapping a woman during his escape. Niedermann seeks help from his old friends at Svavelsjö M.C., kills the treasurer and steals 800,000 kronor before disappearing.
Evert Gullberg, the founder and former chief of "the Section", a secret division of Säpo that harbored and protected Zalachenko, asks former Section associate Frederik Clinton to become acting head of the Section and plots to deflect attention away from the Section by silencing Salander, Blomkvist and Zalachenko. They first form a working alliance with the unsuspecting prosecutor of Salander's case, Richard Ekström ... (Summary by Wikipedia)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an award-winning crime novel by the late Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson, the first in his Millennium Trilogy.
At his death in November 2004, Stieg Larsson left three unpublished novels that made up the Millennium Trilogy. It became a posthumous best-seller in several European countries as well as in the United States. Stieg Larsson, who was disgusted by sexual violence, witnessed the gang rape of a young girl when he was 15. Stieg Larsson never forgave himself for failing to help the girl, whose name was Lisbeth - like the young heroine of Stieg Larsson's books, herself a rape victim, which inspired the theme of sexual violence against women in Stieg Larsson's books. Readers call Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a national bestseller and an international success. It is quite hard to define the genre as it contains elements of murder mystery, love story, and financial puzzle. Harriet Vanger, a descendant of one the wealthiest Sweden's family disappeared almost half a century ago. Her uncle does not give up and goes on to search for the truth. A journalist Mikael Blomkvist with non-formal punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander start the investigation. Two of them meet injustice and corruption.
Reviewer Dessaix writes that "Stieg Larsson's favourite targets are violence against women, the incompetence and cowardice of investigative journalists, the moral bankruptcy of big capital and the virulent strain of Nazism still festering away ... in Swedish society." (Summary by Wikipedia)