In Stockholm, Sweden, vigilante hacker Lisbeth Salander is hired by computer programmer Frans Balder to retrieve Firefall, a program capable of accessing the world's nuclear codes that he developed for the National Security Agency, as Balder believes it is too dangerous to exist. Lisbeth successfully retrieves Firefall from the NSA's servers, attracting the attention of agent Edwin Needham, but is unable to unlock it, and the program is later stolen from her by mercenaries led by Jan Holtser,...

Dennis Clegg is in his thirties and lives in a halfway house for the mentally ill in London. Dennis, nicknamed "Spider" by his mother has been institutionalized with acute schizophrenia for some 20 years. He has never truly recovered, however, and as the story progresses we vicariously experience his increasingly fragile grip on reality.