Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

First line: It happened every year, was almost a ritual.

From the back cover: Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into a complex and atmospheric novel.

Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of iniquity and corruption.

My thoughts: This was my book club selection for June and I am so glad it was. I had purchased this book and the next one in the trilogy, The Girl Who Played With Fire, but they were just sitting on my shelf – not that I didn’t want to read them, but for some reason I was reluctant to pick them up. Not that I should have worried about it, because this was a fast moving book filled with suspense, deception, crime, family secrets, and intrigue. With the several plots going on at the same time, I was totally engrossed. Stieg Larsson goes into great detail about every character and even gives us plenty of background on the situations the characters are in. There’s even a family tree in the beginning of the book, which with all the Swedish names, I had to keep referring to as I progressed through the book. Particularly interesting were the statistics at the beginning of each part in the book – each having to do with assault against women – and each one seemed worse than the one that came before. I am very anxious to read the rest of this trilogy and hope they continue to be as intriguing as this first one was.

(I purchased this book.)