About reading

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (In Spain it has been entitled The man who hates women) is the first volume in the Millennium Trilogy . This was Stieg Larson’s first novel and a phenomenal international best-seller.

A friend of mine told me about this book but I was too busy at the time to read it.   When I managed to open the book and started reading, my mind raced ahead, I couldn’t stop reading, I devoured it in a week.

Larsson’s book is a whirlwind read and introduces one of the truly great new “detective” heroes in modern mystery fiction.

When the novel begins in Stockholm, two separate story lines begin to take shape. First, the investigation reporter and magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist has been convicted of libelling Hans Erik Wennerstrom, a disreputable but powerful businessman; now, with his professional and personal life in shambles, Mikael must figure out how to reestablish his reputation. Second, Lisbeth Salander has been establishing herself as a singularly effective though unconventional private investigator, and her tortured and tawdry past seems to be the perverse key to her peculiar success. She is  a young computer hacker, an anti social punk and most importantly, a young woman driven by her vindictiveness.

Blomkvist is then surprised to find himself working on a special assignment on behalf of Henrik Vanger, an octogenarian industrialist who wants Blomkvist to do two things: write the history of the Vanger family (a family with plenty of secrets) and find out what really happened to Harriet Vanger (the sixteen year old grand-daughter of Henrik’s brother, Richard) who disappeared from the family estate on Hedeby Island as ‘if she had dissolved into thin air‘ nearly forty years earlier. Vanger promises to generously reward Blomkvist for his efforts, and - if he is successful - Vanger promises a bonus: important information about Hans Erik Wennerstrom that Blomkvist can use to vindicate himself and to destroy Wennerstrom.

In a convergence of the two separate story lines, Blomkvist and Salander wind up working together on the case of Harriet Vanger, ‘a sort of locked room mystery in island format.‘ Soon, even as their relationship becomes more complicated and interesting, they begin to discover clues - especially through Bible verses and Biblical names - that will help them close in on someone who may be a sadistic serial murderer, a bloodthirsty person whose many victims may have included the missing Harriet Vanger. And just as Blomkvist and Salander are also about to expose some mind-boggling Vanger family secrets, they find themselves in terrible danger.

Though Larsson was one of Sweden’s most celebrated agitators and crusading journalists, nobody had a clue that he would be such a polished author of fictional thrillers from the very start.

He died of a massive heart attack in 2004, just after delivering the manuscript to his publisher -along with the manuscripts for two sequels. He never saw the 2005 publication of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo  nor its takeoff as one of the literary sensations first in Europe, then pretty much in the rest of the world.

Any amount of praise and superlatives are quite insufficient, but let me just say that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is dramatic, powerful, literate, complex, provocative, unique, and exciting. Even if you read a hundred others this year, you will not read a better mystery novel than Stieg Larsson’s first installment in what promises to be an amazing trilogy. Don’t miss it! Definitely worth a read.