Book read: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

On the trip to Florida, I read one book from cover to cover. It helped that the weather was so-so at the beginning and that the book is quite the page-turner. The author, Stieg Larsson, is no longer with us, having died in 2004 shortly after delivering The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and two more books to his publisher. This is just too sad; his approach to a murder mystery thriller is original and irresistible.

I was drawn to Larsson by a review in the Economist, as I wrote in a previous post. Now I intend to restart this again, as many details make much better sense after reading the Tattoo book. I suspect that the revelation about the meaning of “when all the evil happened” will come in the third book, which is not even published yet in English, as far as I know—OK, Amazon says it’s called The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and is expected to be published in May.

I recommend Larsson’s books highly, but be sure that you have the necessary block of time to read each one right through, as you will probably be compelled to do. Lisbeth Salander, the Girl of all three titles, is truly sui generis, a terrific invention, and you can’t help but root for her to succeed (which you suspect will happen, as in all such books) and find personal fulfilment (the odds for this are even or worse).