The Man Who Played with Fire

“A fascinating ‘creative nonfiction’ account of the greatest unsolved mystery in Swedish history.” —Wall Street Journal

“It’s more than just a thrilling book…There’s a lot of evidence that points to an international conspiracy.” —CBS This Morning Saturday

The author of the Millennium novels laid out the clues. Now a journalist is following them.

When Stieg Larsson died, the author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had been working on a true mystery that out-twisted his Millennium novels: the assassination on February 28, 1986, of Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister. It was the first time in history that a head of state had been murdered without a clue who’d done it—and on a Stockholm street at point-blank range.

Internationally known for his fictional villains, Larsson was well acquainted with their real-life counterparts and documented extremist activities throughout the world. For years he’d been amassing evidence that linked their terrorist acts to what he called “one of the most astounding murder cases” he’d ever covered. Larsson’s archive was forgotten until journalist Jan Stocklassa was given exclusive access to the author’s secret project.

In The Man Who Played with Fire, Stocklassa collects the pieces of Larsson’s true-crime puzzle to follow the trail of intrigue, espionage, and conspiracy begun by one of the world’s most famous thriller writers. Together they set out to solve a mystery that no one else could.

Jan Stocklassa is a Swedish writer and journalist focusing on large-scale conspiracies in international politics. In his books, Stocklassa uses a narrative nonfiction style to unveil unknown facts about important events in recent history.

His breakthrough came with the critically acclaimed bestseller Stieg Larsson’s Archive: The Key to the Palme Murder, a narrative nonfiction book published in 2018 that has been sold in more than fifty countries and translated into twenty-six languages. Following its publication, Swedish police began actively pursuing the leads presented in the book in the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme.

His professional career includes being a Swedish diplomat, launching the Metro newspaper in Prague, and collaborating as a journalist with major media houses in Sweden and abroad, as well as coproducing the movie and TV series Stieg Larsson: The Man Who Played with Fire.

Tara Chace has translated more than forty novels from Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. Her most recent translations include Christina Rickardsson’s Never Stop Walking, Bobbie Peers’s William Wenton books, Jo Nesbø’s Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder series, and Martin Jensen’s The King’s Hounds trilogy. An avid reader and language learner, Chace earned her PhD in Scandinavian languages and literature from the University of Washington in 2003. She enjoys translating books for adults and children. She lives in Seattle with her family.