Book 11 - The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

Stieg Larsson does it again. I'm still not sure what it is about these books but there was pretty much no hope of me not reading the second installment in "The Girl" series - and now, no hope of me not finishing the trilogy when the third book (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) comes out in May. A friend of mine described the experience as being both boring and enthralling and it's a pretty accurate description of these books.

The Girl Who Played with Fire took me a bit longer to get into than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - nearly 200 pages this time before I got "sucked in" - but again, once I got there, I read the remaining 300 pages in a day or so.

I wouldn't say the books are predictable because that would be an oversimplification and honestly, wrong. I didn't know what was going to happen, which was most of the cause for the voracious devouring of the books. The style however and the overall plot was pretty predictable, especially after having read the first book. Larsson uses very standard techniques for the thriller genre and his characters are really only two dimensional. That's not to say that the books or their construction is necessarily bad, there's just something missing from these books for me. I am not an avid fan of the suspense or thriller genres but I'd imagine that if you are, this is pretty typical fare in terms of content and plot structure.

What do you guys think? Any thriller fans out there? How do these books rate?