I’m not a huge reader of crime fiction – I think of it more as a guilty pleasure from time to time if I chance on something that really rocks my boat! But I’m as excited as if it were a new Cormac McCarthy when I receive an advance copy of the second instalment in Larsson’s Millenium trilogy, following up the epic page-turner The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

There are many aspects to the books’ success. Partly, they are inspired by and show a love of the genre. As his English publisher, Christopher MacLehose, relates on this page, Larsson regularly reviewed crime fiction for the magazine where he worked as a graphic designer. And he was a very engaged man, socially and politically. The sinister worlds of organised crime, the sex industry and neo-Nazism were aspects of contemporary Swedish society – for so long considered a model liberal democracy – that both appalled him and provoked his social conscience. In his books, good and evil are clearly defined; the perpetrators must be called to account. Having such remarkable sleuths as his two main characters (Mikael Blomquist and Lisbeth Salander) on the case certainly must have given him a sense of poetic justice.

For me though, Larsson’s crowning achievement is to reproduce and describe a world that ‘we’, the Western middle classes, immediately recognise and relate to (I particularly enjoyed the description of the shopping trip to Ikea in this book), but then put a fire-cracker under it in the form of Salander, the diminutive (four-foot nothing) 25-year-old ward of the state who – after almost losing her life to her appointed guardian – has no intention of letting sleeping dogs lie if any authority figure tries to cross her path again!

The Girl who Played with Fire kicks off with Salander taking some well-deserved R&R in the Caribbean. It seems too good to be true, and sure enough she soon finds herself aware of a domestic abuse situation in which she feels compelled to intervene – in a typically direct fashion! Back home in Stockholm, she moves into her lovely new city apartment, acquired with the proceeds from events readers of the first book will be familiar with. But the forces she has tried to avenge the previous year – like her warden Nils Bjurmann, have no intention of disappearing from her life: not surprising, since Bjurmann’s navel is tattooed ‘I am a sadistic pig – a pervert and a rapist’!

Intent on his own revenge, he soon sets some particularly nasty characters in Salander’s direction ... Meanwhile, over at the Millenium magazine – which is still running strong after its huge success the previous year, an academic and her partner have an especially explosive story on the illicit sex trade in Sweden, which they propose to publish in book form. But when they are found murdered, the team is startled to discover that none other than Salander’s prints have been discovered on the murder weapon! This isn’t the woman that Blomquist in particular knows after the events at the Vanger household the year before, so he makes it his mission to better understand the woman who saved his life: What exactly makes her tick? What is that period in her life she kept referring to (‘all the evil’)? And not least, he is determined to find her before she is stitched up for a murder she surely didn’t commit.

At close to 600 pages, The Girl who Played with Fire is a thumping great read – though one of my colleagues devoured it in very nearly one sitting! I, too, was transported by such fine storytelling, with characters you really care about. It’s been described in a French newspaper as ‘more than a book, a drug’. And yes, I’m addicted!