I’ve rarely read a good thriller that didn’t, at some point, rely on coin­ci­dence to advance its plot. But noth­ing undoes a thriller like a poorly man­aged coin­ci­dence, & The Girl Who Played with Fire, the late Swedish mys­tery author Stieg Larsson’s dis­ap­point­ing follow-​up to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, con­tains sev­eral. The most bla­tant simply insult the reader’s intel­li­gence (I real­ize these won’t make much sense to anyone who hasn’t read the first book):

• Salan­der just hap­pens to walk into an unfa­mil­iar bar where her evil guardian just hap­pens to be talk­ing to the man he has hired to kill her. Just how small is Stock­holm?

Dear friends of Dig­i­tal Emu­nc­tion: Josh Bald­win and I need your help! Vote for one of our posts at 3 Quarks Daily (my mini-​essay on A Lume Spento or Josh’s “Fake Book Review 9″) and we could win real live actual money. (Really: it talks and every­thing.) And boy do we need it–have you seen us recently? Exactly.

So go vote here, and thanks! (You can only vote once, so you’ll have to pick between us, but that’s okay, we’ll for­give you.)

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Futons.

Unfortunately, not a joke.