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 for this review.
Review Copyright © 2008 — M. Wayne Cunningham — All Rights Reserved — Reprinted with Permission
Have you read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? How would you rate it?
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.
