PositiveThe Portland OregonianInherent Vice has weird moments, but is for the most part a fairly conventional detective story. Doc is a counterculture Sam Spade, shaped by the hard-boiled novels and movies he loves … Inherent Vice evokes the era powerfully. In the romantic mythos of insular drug culture, ‘the contrast knob of Creation had been messed with enough to give everything an underglow, a luminous edge, and promise that the night was about to turn epic somehow.’ But on the eve of the Manson trial the voices of Black Power, feminism and the antiwar movement are muted. For Doc, the worm has turned, and it seems that ‘the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all.’
Stieg Larsson, Translated by Reg Keeland
PositiveThe Portland OregonianPrickly and intensely private, the petite, tattooed title character introduced in Stieg Larsson's first novel, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is also definitely not someone you want to cross ... Now, in The Girl Who Played With Fire, there's a whole new set of ignition points to deal with ... Paths cross when the writer producing the story is murdered and Lisbeth's fingerprints are found on the murder weapon. She disappears, and Mikael desperately tries to find her to help ... As with the first book, Larsson weaves a taut, multifaceted, pulse-pounding dark tale that keeps producing surprises to the end.
