The electrifying follow-up to the phenomenal best seller <i> The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo </i>("An intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller" <i>The Washington Post</i>), and this time it is Lisbeth Salander, the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker, who is the focus and fierce heart of the story. <p>Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine <i>Millennium</i>, has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.</p> <p>On the eve of publication, the two reporters responsible for the story are brutally murdered. But perhaps more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander. </p> <p>Now, as Blomkvist, alone in his belief in her innocence, plunges into his own investigation of the slayings, Salander is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all.</p>