The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The
Millennium Trilogy
Stieg
Larsson
Knopf (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-307-26975-2 (0307269752)
ISBN-13: 978-0-307-26975-1 (9780307269751)
Publication Date: September 2008
List Price: $24.95
Synopsis (from
the publisher): 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.
Review:
The Girl With The
Dragon Tattoo is Swedish noir at its best. But the very
elements that fascinate some readers may shake up the more squeamish,
especially in a couple of scenes of sadistic brutality, as necessary as
they are to the integrity of the novel and to the understanding of the
psychological complexity of twenty-four-year-old loner and world class
computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander. That being said, neither Salander
nor her forty-three–year-old partner, investigative financial
journalist Mikael Blomkvist, will be easily forgotten as they research
the forty-year-old unaccounted for disappearance of now eighty-year-old
Swedish businessman Henrik Vanger’s then sixteen-year-old
niece, Harriet. Nor will several bone-chilling, tension-filled episodes
in the book be quickly laid to rest.
There is both breadth and depth to Larsson’s novel with its
slyly embedded references to crime writers Val McDermid, Elizabeth
George and Sue Grafton. The breadth comes from the sweep of the story
that encompasses a wildly dysfunctional Vanger family and the missing
Harriet, side trips with Salander, the computer whiz and decidedly
eccentric private sleuth - as hardened and as sharp as Swedish steel -
and Blomkvists’s forays as he rebounds from losing a libel
suit to investigate Harriet’s disappearance while rattling
every skeleton in the Vanger family closet, satisfying his sexual
appetites, and avenging the loss of his reputation and the near ruin of
his Stockholm-based weekly newsmagazine, Millennium. At any one time
there are several balls in the air, including a cruel annual reminder
to Henrik of Harriet’s disappearance and a number of detailed
exposes of worldwide securities frauds, but all masterfully juggled by
Larsson, with not a bad bounce in the bunch.
The depth in the novel comes from its characters. Salander, with her
tattoos and surly attitudes, is not the girl to bring home to mother,
but with her tolerance for pain, her lightning-quick brain and her
physical agility she’s definitely the one to guard your back.
With Larsson she becomes a case study for a model noir heroine,
especially when she manipulates multiple stock frauds of her own.
Although Blomkvist is a sympathetic protagonist, North American readers
may find his habit of bedding his female married business partner at
Millennium with the knowledge and consent of her artist husband to be a
bit of cultural shock and awe. A couple of other women become his bed
mates as well, but never as more than passing fancies, albeit momentary
passionate ones. The entire Vanger clan - from the patriarchal Henrik,
with his self-imposed guilt over Harriet, on down to the distant family
cousins - make Salander seem like a saint and provide any number of
possible suspects for Harriet’s disappearance before the
bittersweet conclusion to the novel and its implied promise of more
harrowing adventures to come for Salander and Blomkvist.
Originally published in Sweden, The
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, received the 2006 Nordic
Glass Key Award, sadly, a posthumous acknowledgment for Larsson who
died suddenly of a heart attack at age fifty in 2004. The next two
titles in his series, The
Girl Who Played With Fire, and Castles in the Sky
(working title) have already been acclaimed in Europe and are due for
future North American release.
Special thanks to M. Wayne Cunningham (mw_cunningham@telus.net) for contributing his review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and to Random House for providing a copy of the book.
Review
Copyright © 2008 — M. Wayne Cunningham
— All
Rights Reserved
Reprinted with Permission
Mysteries in this series ...
The Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo
Knopf (Hardcover), September 2008
ISBN-10: 0-307-26975-2 (0307269752)
ISBN-13: 978-0-307-26975-1 (9780307269751)
Omnimystery keywords for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
...
Location(s) referenced: Sweden.
