The girl who kicked misogyny and hate

The shame is that it turns out we’ve waited to discover that she’s in intensive care. After all she endured in “The Girl Who Played with Fire,’’ which was published in English last year, where else would she be? But spending most of the book’s 500-plus pages with her on the sidelines is a little like going out to Foxborough to watch Tom Brady hug the bench. On one level, Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is greater than a simple crime series. It’s grappling with the fraying fabric of European society and the political dynamics between the sexes. But in order to appreciate Larsson’s wider canvas, we have to evaluate the brush strokes.

The plot picks up with Salander receiving emergency brain surgery. She remains wanted for three murders that it’s hard to believe she committed. The man who shot her is her father, a former Russian spy who owes his Scandinavian citizenship to a super-secret Swedish government outfit whose elder members are murderously determined to keep their identities private.

As Salander’s legal hot water intensifies, it’s the slutty but righteous reporter Mikael Blomkvist and his Millennium magazine to the rescue. Blomkvist remains convinced of her innocence and commits himself to clearing her name, going so far as to talk his sister, a feminist attorney, into defending her during the book’s wonderfully overcooked courtroom climax. Meanwhile, the Salander affair, as it’s called, bleeds into the new editor-in-chief job of Erika Berger, Millennium’s former editor and Blomkvist’s part-time lover. The new book also introduces, among others, a bodybuilding female government agent (you’ll never guess whose bed she winds up in).