The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo : A Lisbeth Salander Novel

Amazon.com Review Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008 : Once you start The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , there's no turning back. This debut thriller--the first in a trilogy from the late Stieg Larsson--is a serious page-turner rivaling the best of Charlie Huston and Michael Connelly. Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him. Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry. The catch--and there's always a catch--is that Blomkvist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades. With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues. Little is as it seems in Larsson's novel, but there is at least one constant: you really don't want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo. -- Dave Callanan From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. 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. At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden's dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title, Men Who Hate Women ), 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. Hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, who wants to find out what happened to his beloved great-niece before he dies, 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. Larsson died in 2004, shortly after handing in the manuscripts for what will be his legacy. 100,000 first printing. (Sept.) Copyright В© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Mikael Blomkvist, ekonomireporter, döms till fängelse för förtal av finansmannen Wennerström, och beslutar sig för att ta time out från sitt jobb på tidskriften Millennium. I samma veva får han ett ovanligt uppdrag. Henrik Vanger, tidigare en av landets främsta industriledare, vill att Blomkvist ska skriva släkten Vangers historia. Men det visar sig snart bara vara en täckmantel för Blomkvists verkliga uppgift: att ta reda på vad som hänt Vangers unga släkting Harriet, som varit spårlöst försvunnen i snart fyrtio år. Henrik Vanger får årligen på sin födelsedag en påminnelse per post som gör att han inte kan släppa tanken på att hon fortfarande finns i livet. Uppdraget ser till en början hopplöst ut och han behöver hjälp med research. Han får tips om Lisbeth Salander, en ung strulig tjej, tatuerad och piercad, men också professionell hacker och med unika egenskaper som gör henne till en oslagbar researcher. Tillsammans är Blomkvist och Salander ett omaka par men utgör ett oslagbart team, och de kommer allt närmare lösningen på gåtan Harriet. Spänningen stiger när de börjar misstänka att en person i Henrik Vangers närmaste krets är inblandad i en rad sadistiska brott. Stieg Larssons kriminaldebut är av ett enastående slag. Han skriver med en stark känsla för samtiden och det är effektivt, träffsäkert och drivet. Dessutom uppvisar han en mycket stor bredd förenad med djup i sina faktakunskaper. Han besitter en fantastisk förmåga att skapa komplicerade intriger som han knyter ihop med briljans. Det här är första boken av tre böcker om Mikael Blomkvist och Lisbeth Salander. ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE 'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The thrilling first book in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series featuring Lisbeth Salander: “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 New York Times ). • Also known as the Millennium series Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden's wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption. Look for the latest book in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, The Girl in the Eagle's Talons ! The disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden, gnaws at her octogenarian uncle, Henrik Vanger. He is determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder. He hires crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, recently at the wrong end of a libel case, to get to the bottom of Harriet's disappearance. Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old, pierced, tattooed genius hacker, possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age--and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness--assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, an astonishing corruption at the highest echelon of Swedish industrialism--and a surprising connection between themselves.--From publisher description #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The thrilling first book in the Millenium series featuring Lisbeth Salander: “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 New York Times). Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden's wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.