I read this a while ago, and have been meaning to get a review up of it. Something well outside my normal reading zone, but I kept getting people at work saying I must read it, and for the sake of my job I have done!
Book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Author: Stieg Larsson
Mikael Blomqvist, a journalist for the Millennium magazine in Stockholm and facing a three month jail sentence for libel, is hired by industrialist Henrik Vagner to solve the forty year old mystery of the disappearance of Vagner's niece Harriot. In doing so, Blomqvist will find that some families have dark secrets that don't want to see the light, and that allies can come from the unlikeliest of places.
My normal read would be some sort of SF or fantasy work, so this was a little different, although given all the strange place names it did have something in common with my normal fantasy fare. So, with that in mind, you may find some of my comments odd, simply because if its a staple of the thriller or none SF/fantasy genres, I will not have run across it.
If you've not heard of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, then you may well have been hiding under a rock. Famous, partly for the trilogy being posthumously published, but more so for starting the popularity wave that has hit Swedish crime novels in recent months. It has sold millions, both in the original Swedish, and its translations, and has spawned a Swedish version of the films, and due out later this year an English remake. Not suprisingly I've had it recomended by many borrowers over the months since its publication in Britatin, and I haven't seen a request list for the books like it since Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.
Unlike the Da Vinci Code though, it is actually a really good book!
It does take a while to get going though, something that I'd thankfully been warned about previously. The two main characters don't meet until half way through, and most of the initial plot is simply setting up the characters and providing, what seems initially, to be a lot of pointless back story. Having read the second novel as well, it becomes very clear that much of this (seemingly) pointless (but interesting) character building in the first book is very important for continuing with the series, and should not be skimmed over.
Once we get going into the meat of the plot, the tension and pacing improves until you find you can't put the book down until you reach the end. While lacking big set action pieces you might expect to find in a thriller, its more an thinking mans thriller than one of action.
There is a couple of rather dark scenes that may put some people off. Certainly there is a strong theme of sexual violence against women, each of the sections start with a rather depressing statistic on this. While this is well handled in the book with it both furthering plot and character development, anyone with issues in this area should be very careful when reading the book.
Of the two main characters, its the flawed Blomqvist that's the more likable. Despite being the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth is a very difficult character to like. She is very much a damaged person, with serious mental problems, and while you feel sorry for her, you may not find yourself actually liking her. Certainly her approach to life is one very different to your average person.
If you enjoy well written, intelligent novels with a good plot and some interesting characters, I would strongly recommend reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
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