Author: Steig Larsson
Series: Millennium series #1
Published: 2005
Publisher: Penguin Canada
841 pages (mass market paperback)
Summary: Mikael Blomkvist is a investigative financial journalist who partly owns and also works for the financial magazine Millenium. The story opens up with Blomkvist losing a libel case in court against Swedish industrialist billionaire Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. This case catches the attention of Henrik Vanger, the former CEO of Vanger Enterprises, who offers him information about Wennerstrom’s illegal activities and financial help for Millenium in exchange for Blomkvist to research and investigate the disappearance of his great niece, Harriet Vanger, which occurred forty years ago, with the cover story that he is writing an autobiography of the Vanger family should anybody ask. Blomkvist reluctantly agrees, thinking he will not be able to discover anything new from a case that is forty years old, but new evidences are found when he is aided by Lisbeth Salander, a mysterious asocial girl who is a gifted computer hacker.
My Thoughts: I was unable to borrow this book from the public library for what felt like the longest time because it was constantly being checked out. I wanted to read it because I heard it was very good, so I eventually ended up purchasing a copy at the bookstore. I had no idea what to expect from it other than what the summary on the back cover of the book had to tell me. What I found was a wonderful, engrossing story that had the power to keep me up way too late at night because I just had to find out what happens next! Mystery novels by nature tend to have this way of keeping you reading because you want to know ‘whodunnit’, but The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo takes that to a new level. You are perfectly aware of what the mystery is, but for the first half of the novel (which is a very long time, 400 pages!) little to zero progress is made in solving the mystery. It seems hopeless for the characters, because the police had done everything they could for forty years, and Henrik Vanger had also done his own private investigation for forty years, so you wonder what kind of evidence they could have missed and never seen? And can this random journalist really solve it?! Blomkvist doesn’t even meet his partner and sidekick Lisbeth (who is truly a kick ass woman) until the halfway mark. Yet the book strategically and smartly provided enough intrigue that you just had to keep flipping the pages. The second half of the novel was when things blew up in a good way, and suddenly I was absolutely engrossed in the novel; I could not put it down. The mystery heads in a direction I didn’t see coming and I realized this mystery is a lot more than a simple missing girl case. Even the denouement of the novel was exciting and thrilling, despite denouements traditionally being the part of the story where action dies down and it’s just a matter of wrapping up loose ends.
Yes, the book is a little confusing if you are not familiar with the way finances, businesses, companies, stocks and things like that work. Thankfully, you do not need to understand the intricate details to understand the gist of what the characters are talking about. And the mystery … I was amazed how a simple investigation into the disappearance of a missing girl could explode into something so much larger and corrupted. This story is simply marvelous and I cannot wait to read the rest of the series. My only ‘complaint’ would be that, having read the entire novel now, the Swedish title (“Men Who Hate Women“) makes more sense than the American title, but that is really a very minor thing.
Anyway, this is a fantastic book! This is a book I strongly recommend. If you pass by it on a bookstore shelf or something, you should definitely pick it up! It’s a thick book, but every moment is captivating.
My Rating: 5/5
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