The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson: Book #18 for 2018
The second book in the Millennium series takes place some time after the opening book, The Girl Who Played with Fire. At the start, Lisbeth Salander has stopped talking to Mikael Blomqvist, for reasons that aren't clear.
The book starts off slowly; there's a moment early in the book where Salander stops a man killing his wife, only for the man to later show up dead, although I was unsure how this episode connected with the rest of the story. At the same time, Millennium magazine are working on an expose of sex trafficking. Also, some shady characters are plotting to "disappear" Salander.
The book really gets going about a third of the way in, when Blomqvist and his sister, on the way back from a party, drop in to the home of two of the journalists who were working on the expose, only to find that they have both been murdered. This is followed shortly by the discover of a third murder victim, a character who will be familiar from the first novel.
Salander immediately becomes the prime supect in the killings, but she has gone almost completely off radar, so much of the book deals with the attempts of other characters to find her. She communicates with Blomqvist by remotely hacking his iPad and leaving responses to messages he has left her.
I didn't quite enjoy it as much as the first book, since the pace felt slower, but I enjoyed the narrative style, and the action did pick up gradually throughout the book. I also liked the fact that it fleashed out Salander's backstory coniderably, particularly with some late plot twists.The final two chapters were the most gripping and intense in the whole book, and it started to look like it would be impossible for the book to have anything close to a happy ending.
The book's denouement was satisfying though; it felt like the ending to a Hitchcock film.