Publisher's Description:
Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family's remote island retreat north of Stockholm, nor do fiction debuts hotter than this European bestseller by muckraking Swedish journalist Larsson. At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden's dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title, Men Who Hate Women), this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail for libeling a shady businessman, and the multipierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable superhacker. Hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, who wants to find out what happened to his beloved great-niece before he dies, the duo gradually uncover a festering morass of familial corruption—at the same time, Larsson skillfully bares some of the similar horrors that have left Salander such a marked woman. Larsson died in 2004, shortly after handing in the manuscripts for what will be his legacy. 100,000 first printing. (Sept.)
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I didn't think I'd like this book, so it sat on my bookshelf for about six months before I picked it up. I was very pleasantly surprised. Overall, I think it was a good book. I enjoyed it, and I will most definitely pick up the second (and probably third) book in the series.
I struggled with some of the Swedish names and locations, and often found myself having to pause to figure out which name a "B" character or "H" location was. However, I think that comment can be taken as both a criticism and a compliment. Criticism, because I'm usually a lazy reader. I don't usually want to have to work too hard to keep everything straight as I read. On the flip side, the story was more than good enough too make up for the vocabulary. Reading was very slow going for me, but there were multiple times when I picked it up that an hour would fly by without my notice as I read. I think that says a lot.
I think that it's worth saying that I was on page 250 before the story was past the setup stage and (to me) really kicked in. Again, though, for an 850 page book, I don't think that's unreasonable... especially since I hear that the next two books continue with the story so smoothly, that they could almost have been published as one big (huge) book instead of three.
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