Combine the chilly Swedish backdrop and moody psychodrama of a Bergman movie with the grisly pyrotechnics of a serial-killer thriller, then add an angry punk heroine and a down-on-his-luck investigative journalist, and you have the ingredients of Stieg Larsson’s first novel, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo...Mr. Larsson’s two protagonists — Carl Mikael Blomkvist, a reporter filling the role of detective, and his sidekick, Lisbeth Salander, a k a the girl with the dragon tattoo — who make this novel more than your run-of-the-mill mystery: they’re both compelling, conflicted, complicated people, idiosyncratic in the extreme, and interesting enough to compensate for the plot mechanics, which seize up as the book nears its unsatisfying conclusion ...his reportorial eye for detail and an instinctive sense of mood to create a noirish picture of Stockholm and a small island community to the north, showing us both the bright, shiny lives of young careerists and older aristos, and a seamy underworld where sexual and financial corruption flourish.
The novel offers a thoroughly ugly view of human nature, especially when it comes to the way Swedish men treat Swedish women. In Larsson’s world, sadism, murder and suicide are commonplace — as is lots of casual sex ... The book opens with an intriguing mystery. Henrik Vanger, an octogenarian industrialist, hires Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist who has just lost a libel case under murky circumstances, to investigate the disappearance of his great-niece, Harriet ... The novel perks up as their investigation gains speed, though readers will need some time to sort through the various cousins and nephews and half-brothers and -sisters who populate the Vanger family ... But if the middle section of Girl is a treat, the rest of the novel doesn’t quite measure up ... Without any warning, Girl metamorphoses into a boring account of Blomkvist’s effort to take down the executive who originally won the libel lawsuit mentioned at the start of the novel ... And so Girl ends blandly.
Stieg Larsson's debut crime novel, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, leaves you wanting more from an odd investigative duo ...surprisingly disappointed by the first few chapters: They are dense with character and plot development, financial reporting mixed with umlaut-heavy names of people and places I didn't know ... The mystery unfolds, and the book takes off, in the fourth chapter: From there, it becomes classic parlor crime fiction with many modern twists ... The writing is not beautiful, clipped at times (though that could be the translation by Reg Keeland) and with a few too many falsely dramatic endings to sections or chapters. But it is a compelling, well-woven tale that succeeds in transporting the reader to rural Sweden for a good crime story.
...an intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller that is variously a serial-killer saga, a search for a missing person and an informed glimpse into the worlds of journalism and business ... In time we meet a fiendish and all too efficient serial killer, but the novel's most memorable character is the woman who provides its title ... Lisbeth is a punk Watson to Mikael's dapper Holmes, and she's the coolest crime-fighting sidekick to come along in many years ... It's hard to find fault with "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." One must struggle with bewildering Swedish names, but that's a small price to pay. The story starts off at a leisurely pace, but the reader soon surrenders to Larsson's skillful narrative ... It's a book that lingers in the mind.
Stieg Larsson is a member of a club few want to join: writers who die before their novels makes it big — in his case before they're even published ... A 450-plus-page whodunit from a rookie normally would inspire suspicions that it might suffer from a lack of discipline. Quite the opposite here. This book is meticulously plotted, beautifully paced, and features a cast of two indelible sleuths and so many juicy suspects that the book's length becomes a plus — though the coda is too insistent on tying up the last loose end ... Blomkvist and Salander are characters you want to spend time with, as their doubts and fears — as they say in Swedish, oy, have they got complexes — constantly joust with their talent and self-confidence. Larsson, meanwhile, deftly works in issues he was concerned about — right-wing extremism, violence against women, a docile Swedish business press — without letting the politics overpower the story.
Sometimes a mystery succeeds because of one indelible character. Consider Miss Marple. Now there is Lisbeth Salander, the star of Stieg Larsson's international sensation, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ... Lisbeth teams up with the disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist. He has been hired by an aged Swedish magnate who wants Blomkvist to write a family history — and discover who murdered his 16-year-old niece 40 years earlier ... The Sweden Larsson describes is almost as compelling as his heroine and far darker than the IKEA paradise of sensible Volvos and egalitarian relationships most Americans envision ... Larsson's mesmerizing tale succeeds because, like P.D. James, he has written a why-dunit rather than whodunit. The solution to the mystery and the identity of the killer are pretty obvious.
...after a diet of serial killers, apocalyptic scenarios, burned-out private detectives and the usual crop of honest or bent federal agents and cops, it's like a blast of cold, fresh air to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — the latest entry in the booming Swedish crime-fiction... But what separates Stieg Larsson's work from theirs is that it features at its center two unique and fascinating characters: a disgraced financial journalist and the absolutely marvelous 24-year-old Lisbeth Salander... Their relationship blossoms — despite his finding out that in the course of investigating him, she has hacked into his own computer. We watch as Salander's distrust of almost everyone (totally justified by her own terrible experiences with guardians and lawyers) begins to thaw. As for Blomkvist, he realizes what an incredible creature Salander is.
Arriving here under the banner International Bestseller, Stieg Larsson's wintery look into the Swedish psyche is densely packed and oddly disappointing ... Billed as a thriller, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has all the elements: murder on a remote island, journalist turned detective, girl hacker intent on helping him solve the mystery — and person or persons unknown, out to get them ...we wade through a tedious account of how and why Blomkvist was disgraced, which involves an expose based on information from a character we're never going to see again. It ties in, but not soon enough ... There's also plenty of gore, amazing sadism — but it all takes too long to get where it's going and trickles on afterward for way too many pages. If Larsson had cut to the chase, this would have worked, but it doesn't. Blame those Swedish winters.
The girl with the dragon tattoo is one of many intriguing characters you'll encounter in Stieg Larsson's mesmerizing not-to-be-missed Swedish mystery ... Her name is Lisbeth Salander and she has a gift. She can unearth a secret no matter how deeply buried. And there are a lot of them in this novel ... Another compelling character, Mikael Blomkvist, is the novel's protagonist and the story's amateur detective ... putting aside his work at the magazine he owns, Millenium, to explore Harriet's disappearance with fresh eyes. Eventually, Salander joins his investigation and the deepening relationship between Blomkvist and Salander is fascinating and a bit disturbing ... It's a smart financial thriller, a believable if unconventional love story, and a family saga laced with enough betrayals, treachery and just plain sibling nastiness that, as one character says, the Vangers 'make Shakespeare's tragedies' seem like 'light entertainment.'
The late Stieg Larsson's first novel is a locked-room (really, locked-island) mystery in a family chronicle that expands to become an expose of international financial corruption and the problems of Swedish society ...a big, intricately plotted, darkly humorous work, rich with ironies, quirky but believable characters and a literary playfulness that only a master of the genre and its history could bring off ... Because there are many characters and the situation is complex, the narrative begins slowly, but Larsson keeps it interesting as the action accelerates to its strange and disturbing conclusion ... The minor characters and the crime itself would seem quite familiar to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, whose portraits of the corruption and amorality of the 'big rich' are certainly echoed here.
...a violent thriller that focuses on a complex financial fraud and a powerful family's sinister secret. It starts slowly, with details of how a Swedish company is ripping off government funding to set up a fake business in Russia. The novel picks up speed when it gets into the complexities of the wealthy Vanger family's past ... The journalist and the hacker are ingenious, believable creations, in conflict with themselves and each other. They form an incongruous but credible bond as everyone they meet is against them ... This is a striking novel, full of passion, an evocative sense of place and subtle insights into venal, corrupt minds.
The bestselling Swedish novel The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo begins as an anti-thriller, devoid of the genre's usual chapter-to-chapter cliffhangers ... Larsson's leads are oddly attractive in their complete disinterest in being liked: Blomkvist is an anti-sleuth, immune to the allure of payment even when his former career hangs in the balance, but also to the protests of Henrik's relatives over the re-opening of the case. Lisbeth, too, prefers her chilly, compartmentalized assignments to a lasting career ...so well-developed, their bizarre paths, studded with moments of absurd humor... Larsson indulges in some grisly scenes, but makes it clear that the worst crimes have already taken place in the twisted memories of those involved.
Set in Stockholm and a small country town in the north of Sweden, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo tells the mesmerizing story of disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who has been charged with and convicted of libel... Vanger wants to hire him for a two-fold purpose: first, to write a chronicle of the Vanger family; and second, to solve the mystery of one of the darkest moments in that family’s history — the murder of his great-niece Harriet in 1966 ... This atmospheric thriller is so tautly plotted and full of well-rounded, albeit flawed, characters who jump right off the page. It might feel a tad slow in the beginning (though that can be chalked up to European writers being more amenable to taking their time), but once the story hits its stride, the reader is riveted.
Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family's remote island retreat north of Stockholm, nor do fiction debuts hotter than this European bestseller by muckraking Swedish journalist Larsson ...this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail for libeling a shady businessman, and the multipierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable superhacker ...the duo gradually uncover a festering morass of familial corruption—at the same time, Larsson skillfully bares some of the similar horrors that have left Salander such a marked woman.
...this first of his three novels, a bestseller in Europe, is a labored mystery ... There are three story lines here: The future of the magazine, Lisbeth’s travails (she has a sexually abusive guardian) and, most important, the Harriet mystery. This means an inordinately long setup. Only at the halfway point is there a small tug of excitement as Mikael breaks the case and enlists Lisbeth’s help. The horrors are legion: Rape, incest, torture and serial killings continuing into the present ... The tycoon’s empire has nothing to do with the theme of violence against women which has linked Lisbeth’s story to the Vanger case, and the last 50 pages are inevitably anticlimactic. Juicy melodrama obscured by the intricacies of problem-solving.
