The struggle with this book is finally over. 
 After having read "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", I was looking forward to reading this book so much, it actually managed to disappoint me enormously. I needed one week to get through the first book of the series. And one entire month to get through the second. 
 At first, here's 
 what I liked 
 about it (spoiler-free!): 
 Lisbeth Salander is one of the most amazing characters I've ever met in literature. Scenes with her as a present force were the ones which kept me reading. The character development is brilliantly done, the exploration of her personal background comes very close to being shattering and fascinating at the same time. 
 In addition, the villains are actually allowed to be called characters in their own right. They have motivations, they have fears, they have scruples, they have feelings, and yet they commit the deeds they are called villains for. Stieg Larsson cedes a lot of text to describe the characters' social backgrounds, their working environment and private relationships as well as the relations between each character. All of them are flawed, and - likeable or not - characters whose motivations you can at least retrace, even if not always understand or share. 
 And last, but not least, Stieg Larsson knows how to write a thriller. During the last three chapters, this book was a real page-turner, gripping and compelling alike. But then, why didn't "The Girl Who Played With Fire" keep up with its predecessor's quality level? 
 The aspects I liked about the novel are simultaneously exactly the 
 aspects I disliked 
 about it. Lisbeth is the most interesting character out of the entire novel, yet she doesn't even appear for more than 200 pages. The characters themselves are written in an interesting way with all their backgrounds, relationships etc. - yet there are so many, the reader would have needed a glossary to keep them apart from each other. How can I be supposed to distinguish two people called Sonny who both only appear twice or thrice throughout the entire novel? Maybe I do have no good long-term memory, but I just didn't mind twenty newly introduced characters, all working at the police force and investigating the crime case, contributing nothing to the plot and not being close to becoming interesting enough for me to keep up with their scenes. We still had a lot of Mikael and Lisbeth, but Stieg Larsson also included a lot of material surrounding minor characters, material which perhaps made the story feel more realistic, but which also made me feel bored throughout the course of very, very long-winded chapters. 
 I am pleased with the thrilling climax and the cliffhanger, but if it takes 680 out of 760 pages to lead me into the story's core, I just don't care anymore. Two other major issues with this novel included the lack of realistic dialogues and the descriptive writing style which was already present in the first part of the series, but even more so in this one. Do we really have to spend six pages with Lisbeth buying furniture and thinking about how to arrange her new apartment? Apart from that, I had a lot of problems with trying to get into Mikael's head. In contrast to "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo", where Mikael was the uncontested protagonist, he appeared like a minor character in this one, and we did nothing but observe him while he was doing his work. Nothing really happened for a long time of the story. Ultimately, I was bored by it. 
 The plot was indisputably well-developed, but the implementation into written words lacked exactly the author's affectionate devotion I monitored while reading the previous novel. For me, this was a huge disappointment, but I will definitely read the third book, "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest", soon, and I can only hope it will be a dignified completion of the series.