From the book jacket: A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden…and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.
It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance…and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age – and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it – who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism – and an unexpected connection between themselves.
After seeing many great reviews of this book on other blogs several months ago, I requested it from my library. It finally became available three weeks ago.
The book begins with Mikael’s libel case, and I was nervous for a chapter or two that the book would be filled with details of financial corruption that I tend to find dry (despite being an accountant by training). Lucky for me, 2/3rds of the book focuses on Harriet’s disappearance and Mikael’s investigative experiences. Larsson intricately weaves connections among many of the characters, and introduces multiple complicated relationships in a way that is, surprisingly, not confusing. As you may have gathered from previous reviews, my ability to feel the essence of the characters is essential to my satisfaction with a book Larsson achieved this well. Though the ending may have tied things up a little too neatly, it was satisfying.
Stieg Larsson died of a massive heart attack in 2004. He left the manuscripts of three completed but unpublished novels in a series. He wrote them for his own pleasure after returning home from his job in the evening, making no attempt to get them published until shortly before his death. The first of these was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The second, The Girl Who Played with Fire was published in 2006, and I will definitely be adding it to my TBR list. According to Wikipedia, the series was intended to be 10 books, and he had a partial manuscript for book four, along with synopses of books 5 and 6.
Edited to add: One down in my Mysteryreader Cafe challenge!
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