Written as the first book in a trilogy of brutal suspense thrillers, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starts with Mikael Blomkvist, a magazine journalist/publisher who's been disgraced by a recent libel case against one of Sweden's most prominent businessmen. On his way to a light prison sentence and licking his ego wounds, Blomqvist becomes involved in an old missing persons case. Harriet Vanger, the sixteen-year-old heiress to a large corporate fortune, disappeared years ago--and everyone except her great-uncle, Henrik, thinks she's dead. The case is Henrik's white whale, and as he gets older and more frail, he wants definitive answers. Knowing that Blomqvist is a good journalist (pesky libel conviction aside) with some time on his hands, he hires the writer to come out to his tiny town, which is populated by his eccentric, hostile, and just plain awful relatives. Pretty much everyone involved has a motive to have wanted Harriet gone, and Mikael is tasked with finding out which one of them is responsible for the girl's disappearance back in the 60s (under the guise of writing a biography of the Vanger family).Blomqvist takes the case, 'cause he needs the truckloads of cash that Vanger promises--as well as the super-secret evidence that Vanger supposedly has that proves Blomqvist's innocence in the libel case. Blomqvist hires an unlikely partner, Lisbeth Salander, to help. Lisbeth is a young woman who has zero social skills, but some kind of ninja ability to uncover top secret information. The two dig deeper into the Vanger family secrets, and discover that--surprise!--someone in the Vanger family really doesn't want them finding out what happened to Harriet. It's kind of like Clue, but with 100% more shady blond people.
While Blomqvist and Salander are struggling with ugly revelations of murder, double identities, and horrific sexual practices, the B-plot follows the fate of Blomqvist's magazine, Millenium, as he and his best friend/f-buddy/editor-in-chief Erika Berger try to keep everything afloat.
Overall, I liked the book quite a bit. I don't read many thrillers these days, and this one reminded me of how compelling they can be when done well. And Larsson makes his social justice agenda clear. The Swedish title of the book translates into "Men Who Hate Women." (Something tells me this book wouldn't have been the subway-reading hit it was, if the American publisher had kept that on the cover.) And Larsson is not squeamish about hitting the reader with all sorts of male-on-female violence. Pretty much any way a modern woman can be used and abused by the worst of men is in the book somewhere. And I also liked the way he created the female characters--bold, sexual, and not apologetic at all. For example, the female lead, Lisbeth, is not a pleasant person. She's blunt, probably on the autism spectrum, and unable to trust anyone. But she's extremely good at what she does, and draws attraction and respect (from non-evil dudes, anyway).
The plot has a few too many deus-ex-machina moments, but they're not so clunky that they don't fit in. And given that the writer dropped dead of a heart attack before the book even came out, I don't really fault the lack of polish/editing. The characters are interesting enough to make it worthwhile, and the writing (whether through translation or by design) is straightforward. I enjoyed it enough to rush out and get my hands on the sequel, to see what those zany Swedes will get up to next.
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