Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Steig Larsson

The Story: So, there are really two stories going on here at the same time and they are both pretty complex. I’m just going to break it down real quick and avoid any spoilers. Here ya go:

The Vanger Corporation is one of the largest corporations in Sweden and has been for quite some time. A large portion of the family lives on an island and once every year or so everyone goes there for a big family reunion/business meeting.  During that meeting n 1966, one of the family members- Harriet- disappears.  She is 16 years old and her great uncle Henrick kind of becomes obsessed with finding her.

Flash forward to 2005.  Henrick has never given up looking although he believes all leads have been followed.  The fact that she has disappeared from an island blows his mind and he’s pretty sure that someone in his family is involved.  His family is flat out crazy, so he has pretty good reason for believing that.

Also in 2005, financial reporter Mikeal Blomkvist gets tried and convicted of libel against larger-than-life financial giant Hans-Erik Wennerstrom.  He has good info but refuses to give up his sources, so he is sentenced to a couple months in jail, but more importantly he’s stripped of his credibility.  Right after his conviction, he is contacted by Henrick Vanger and asked to spend a year digging up information on Harriet.  In return he promises a good amount of money, but also good info (with sources) on Wennerstrom.

Mikeal takes the job and moves to the island to spend the year pouring through old papers and pictures and trying to figure this whole mess out.  After making a couple of lucky breaks, he realizes that he can only do this with help.  Enter Lisbeth Salander, or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  She is an expert hacker and a great detective and the two team up to figure out the Harriet mystery and sink Wennerstrom.

Mixed up in there are: Nazis, incest, money laundering, murder, religious nuts, quite a bit of casual sex, violence against women, affairs, corporate fraud, and a whole mess of other issues.  This bad boy is 650 pages of pure crazy.

What I Thought: There was absolutely no reason for me to enjoy this as much as I did.  It was, in places, poorly translated.  The characters were kinda flat.  There was excessive violence, even for a mystery book.  The author went off on bunny trails that would take him 100 pages to return from.  I could continue.  This book did have weaknesses.

I pretty much loved it.

I’ve heard other people say that it took them 100 pages or so to get into it, but for me it was an immediate love.  Maybe it was just what I was in the mood for.  The modern mystery with all the corporate shenanigans and libel suits and such drew me in from the get-go and by the time that we got to the much more interesting mystery of what happened with Harriet, I was already sold.  I was staying up to late to read, thinking about it when I wasn’t reading and pretty much ignoring my husband for big chunks of each evening.  All this to say: this was a page turner when I was in the mood it.

Maybe I’m stupid, but most of the twisty parts I never even saw coming.  I would say that my one complaint about most mystery books is that I can think faster than I can read and I always get ahead of the author.  For me, that didn’t happen here.  A couple of times I had kind of guessed at the “answer,” but most of the time I was surprised.

I will say though, for those of you who stick mostly to bubbly, fun stuff: there are parts of this book that are fairly gruesome.  There is a lot of violence, including sexual violence and if that kind of things gets under your skin, I would probably be a little bit more reluctant to pick this one up.

Conclusion: The literary merit of this book isn’t off the charts, but what it lacks in that it makes up for in suspense and just plain old readability. A great summer read.  Read this on vacation or on the beach.  It’s not hard to get into and will keep your attention for a good long while.  Good stuff.