Book #26 - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I’ve been wanting to read this so I could watch the movie, and I finally got a copy in the UK, starting it last week. I’m surprised how popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is after reading it, since it doesn’t have a ton of action in it, but it is well written and builds into something that I struggled to put down.

The book meanders along, working between the two main characters. It almost seems like a lazy Sunday afternoon as it progresses through the year. There are a few exciting moments, and it’s definitely an adult themed book with some graphic sex in it, but not thrilling. I enjoyed it, but I like those slow moving, thoughtful books.

There’s the unsociable, or maybe anti-social Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo. She’s a PI, world class hacker, but not well functioning well with others. She’s hired to investigate people by a security company, and she ends up taking a case on Mikael Blomkvist, the other main character.

Mikael is a writer, an investigative financial journalist who owns a financial magazine and has just been convicted of libel. He’s unsure of what to do, but he’s offered a job to come search for a murdered by a retired industrialist in Northern Sweden. The entire book takes place in Sweden, was written in Swedish, and is really a murder mystery. Except the murder occurred 20 years ago.

A family on an island had the grand daughter of the industrialist disappear. No one every found the body or knew what happened, but there were only a few people on the island and suspicion is cast on all of them. I don’t want to give the details, but with little confidence in the outcome, and partially to get away, Mikael takes the job, and becomes fascinated by the story.

The story moves to an exciting conclusion about the murder, and then continues on, meandering further as it wraps up some of the other questions of Lisbeth and Mikhael as they work together and become closer.

It was a book I really enjoyed, and now my reading list is getting jumbled since I want to read the next two.