The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium Trilogy Series #1)

From Barnes & Noble

This gritty thriller is packed with deceit, treachery, and plenty of dirty family secrets -- enough to fill an entire basement with skeletons. --Elayne Carringer, Devon, PA

Gripping! I even read at stop lights and while I was brushing my teeth. --Sarah Goodrich, Lexington, KY

From Writers and Reviewers
As vivid as bloodstains on snow -- and a perfect one-volume introduction to the unique strengths of Scandinavian crime fiction. --Lee Child

What a cracking novel! I haven't read such a stunning thriller debut for years…. Brilliantly written and totally gripping. --Minette Walters

"The ballyhoo is fully justified…. At over 500 pages this hardly sagged…. The novel scores on every front -- character, story, atmosphere. --The Times (London)

A publishing sensation…. Crime fiction has seldom needed to salute and mourn such a stellar talent as Larsson's in the same breath. --Sunday Times (London)

Patrick Anderson

Michiko Kakutani

Publishers Weekly

With its rich characterizations and intriguing plot, the first book of the late Stieg Larsson's completed trilogy, involving disgraced Swedish journalist-publisher Mikael Blomkvist and the eponymous, pierced and tattooed, emotionally troubled young hacker-investigator Lisbeth Salander, clearly deserves the acclaim it's received overseas. Martin Wenner's almost indifferent, British-accented narration would seem an odd choice for a novel filled with passion, sex and violence, but as the oddly coupled Blomkvist and Salander probe the four-decade-old disappearance of Harriet Vanger, heiress to one of Sweden's wealthiest clans, the objective approach actually accentuates the extreme behavior of both and the strange subjects of their investigation. Wenner's calm, controlled manner aids the listener in keeping track of the numerous members of the Vanger family, a task that the printed book simplifies with a reference page. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, July 14). (Sept.)

Library Journal

Ever since Knopf editor Sonny Mehta bought the U.S. rights last November, the prepublication buzz on this dark, moody crime thriller by a Swedish journalist has grown steadily. A best seller in Europe (it outsold the Bible in Denmark), this first entry in the "Millennium" trilogy finally lands in America. Is the hype justified? Yes. Despite a sometimes plodding translation and a few implausible details, this complex, multilayered tale, which combines an intricate financial thriller with an Agatha Christie-like locked-room mystery set on an island, grabs the reader from the first page. Convicted of libeling a prominent businessman and awaiting imprisonment, financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist agrees to industrialist Henrik Vanger's request to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of Vanger's 16-year-old niece, Harriet. In return, Vanger will help Blomkvist dig up dirt on the corrupt businessman. Assisting in Blomkvist's investigation is 24-year-old Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant but enigmatic computer hacker. Punkish, tattooed, sullen, antisocial, and emotionally damaged, she is a compelling character, much like Carol O'Connell's Kathy Mallory, and this reviewer looks forward to learning more of her backstory in the next two books (The Girl Who Played with Fire and Castles in the Sky). Sweden may be the land of blondes, Ikea, and the Midnight Sun, but Larsson, who died in 2004, brilliantly exposes its dark heart: sexual violence against women, a Nazi past, and corporate corruption. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ5/1/03.]
—Wilda Williams

From the Publisher

“An exceptional effort for a first-time crime novelist. In fact, a fine effort for any crime novelist . . . This book is meticulously plotted, beautifully paced, and features a cast of two indelible sleuths and many juicy suspects.”
–Boston Globe

“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.”
–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“The book lands in the United States as Wall Street sputters and global markets clench, a timely fit to Larsson’s themes of corporate corruption. He tells his crime story cleverly, but the zing in Dragon Tattoo is inked in its two central characters.”
–Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A super-smart amalgam of the corporate corruption tale, legal thriller and dysfunctional-family psychological suspense story. It’s witty and unflinching . . . Larsson’s multi-pieced plot snaps together as neatly as an Ikea bookcase, but even more satisfying is the anti-social character of Salander.”
–Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air (NPR)

“It’s like a blast of cold, fresh air to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo . . . It features at its center two unique and fascinating characters: a disgraced financial journalist and the absolutely marvelous 24-year-old Lisbeth Salander–a computer-hacking Pippi Longstocking with pierced eyebrows and a survival instinct that should scare anyone who gets in her way.”
–Chicago Tribune

“Larsson’s novel could serve as the definition of page-turner . . . The worst part: We have to wait until summer ’09 for the second installment.”
–Time Out New York

“The biggest Swedish phenom since ABBA.”
–People

“Imagine the movies of Ingmar Bergman crossed with Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs. Larsson’s mesmerizing tale succeeds because, like P.D. James, he has written a why-dunit rather than a whodunit.”
–USA Today

“A whip-smart heroine and a hunky guy who needs her help? This sexy, addictive thriller is everything you never knew you could get from a crime novel.”
–Glamour

“Larsson’s debut thriller succeeds on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. First off, it’s an absolute page-turner. But the characters are so fascinating and the clear, understated writing so graceful, you are going to want to savor it . . . Electrifying.”
–Portsmouth Herald (NH)

“Is the hype justified? Yes . . . This complex, multilayered tale grabs the reader from the first page.”
–Library Journal (starred)

“The first U.S. appearance of another major Swedish crime writer is cause for celebration . . . The novel offers compelling chunks of investigative journalism, high-tech sleuthing, and psychosexual drama. What a shame that we only have three books in which to watch the charismatic Lisbeth Salander take on the world!”
–Booklist

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a striking novel. Just when I was thinking there wasn't anything new on the horizon, along comes Stieg Larsson with this wonderfully unique story. I was completely absorbed.”
–Michael Connelly

“I doubt you will read a better book this year.”
–Val McDermid

“Dark, labyrinthine, smart, sexy, utterly original, and completely captivating, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo delights at every level. Nuanced, sympathetic characters, caught in a tangle of unusual and compelling relationships, grapple with a baffling family mystery and with their own demons in the unique literary environment of modern-day Sweden. This book is artful and grand entertainment. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.”
–John Lescroart

“So much more than a thriller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a dazzling novel of big ideas. It tackles issues of power, corruption, justice, and innocence–all the while drawing you into the twists and turns of a frighteningly suspenseful mystery.”
–Harlan Coben

“As vivid as bloodstains on snow.”
–Lee Child

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an utterly fresh political and journalistic thriller that is also intimate and moral. In spite of its dark unearthings Stieg Larsson has written a feast of a book, with central characters you will not forget.”
–Michael Ondaatje

“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 . . . At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden’s dirty not-so-little secrets, this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred)

“What a cracking novel! I haven’t read such a stunning thriller debut for years. The way Larsson interweaves his two stories had me in thrall from beginning to end. Brilliantly written and totally gripping.”
–Minette Walters

“With its compelling situation, its complex plot and especially its unique, fully-realized characters, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo embodies–in seamless translation–the best of European crime fiction.”
–S.J. Rozan

“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a Tolstoyan re-invention of the ‘closed room’ murder mystery, Agatha Christie for adults. Curl up on the sofa with this masterwork of noir and let Stieg Larsson draw you into the shadows. It’s also a profound investigation into tribal violence in the world of high finance, and a revelation of the dark side of a country normally seen as the very height of propriety. By the end of the first chapter you will know better. By the end of the second you will be putty in his hands. Don’t even think about putting it down.”
–John Burdett

From the UK:

“Crime fiction has seldom needed to salute and mourn such a stellar talent as Larsson’s in the same breath.”
–The Sunday Times

“Larsson has up his sleeve two extremely engaging protagonists. Once these characters have appeared, our surrender to the novel is guaranteed . . . This is classic English mystery territory. But what follows is much darker and bloodier–more Thomas Harris than Dorothy L. Sayers.”
–The Independent

“The ballyhoo is fully justified . . . The novel scores on every front–character, story, atmosphere, and the translation.”
–The Times

“This is a striking novel, full of passion, an evocative sense of place and subtle insights into venal, corrupt minds . . . The journalist and the hacker are ingenious creations.”
–The Observer

“One of the greatest crime-fiction novels I have ever read . . . As mesmerizing as it is insightful . . . The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a multi-layered, multi-character tale by a writer of some considerable power. Full of social conscience and compassion, with insight into the nature of moral corruption, it knocked me out . . . Mikael Blomkvist and his partner, the enigmatic and deeply troubled Lisbeth Salander, will soon join the pantheon of greatest crime-fiction characters that populate the genre at its apex.”
–Shots Magazine

“A blockbuster story . . . The plot is interesting and credible but above all the heroine is splendidly original . . . An extraordinary book.”
–Literary Review

“An absorbing and idiosyncratic crime novel.”
–Daily Mail

The Barnes & Noble Review

The eccentric sidekick is nearly as familiar a genre convention as the lonely private eye, and Larsson, who was an eager student of the canon, dreamed up a fairly irresistible one. She is Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo; and although she doesn't meet her partner-in-crime-solving until more than halfway through the novel, the reader connects with her right away. In fact, the book sprang to life for me at a precise moment on page 32 with the introduction of Salander, a goth wild child and a delightfully unlikely heroine.

"She was the very quintessence of difficult," thinks Salander's boss at the staid private-security firm where she works as a researcher. Whip-thin, abundantly tattooed and pierced, her dyed hair "as short as a fuse," Salander skulks through the corridors like a feral club kid. She has a gift for annoying the other employees, some of whom suspect she might be retarded. In fact Salander, who is 24 years old but looks 14, is an investigative savant, a high school dropout with freakishly superior computer skills who refuses to reveal her information sources and whose work methods are, to say the least, unorthodox.

One of the people Salander has recently investigated is Mikael Blomkvist, a well-known financial reporter and part owner of a muckraking magazine called Millennium . According to her report, Blomkvist is "a public person with few secrets and not very much to hide." Yet readers will find him to be a multi-dimensional and urgent figure, driven by an angry social conscience to expose the unchecked corruption that's rotting the top tiers of Swedish high finance. And he's just as angry about the cowardice of some of his journalist colleagues, who treat CEOs like rock stars and neglect to go after "the sharks who created interest crises and speculated away the savings of small investors." Moody, droll, and often surprisingly gentle, Blomkvist is not the only journalist-turned-sleuth in the mystery world -- other contemporary crime novels, by writers like Denise Mina, Denise Hamilton, Val McDermid, and Liza Marklund, feature reporters as protagonists -- but he is certainly one of the most engaging.

Both Blomkvist and the magazine are on the verge of bankruptcy after his humiliating defeat in a libel case, brought against him by a powerful industrialist named Hans-Erik Wennerström. Needing time to lick his wounds, Blomkvist decides to accept an offer to spend a year looking into an unsolved mystery that occurred 40 years ago on an island near a small industrial town called Hedestad, three hours north of Stockholm.

The offer comes from Henrik Vanger, octogenarian patriarch of a once-renowned family corporation whose influence is on the wane. What haunts the old man is the long-ago disappearance of his beloved grandniece, Harriet, when she a teenager.

Convinced she was murdered, Vanger dangles two incentives in front of Blomkvist to persuade him to re-investigate this very cold case: a large sum of money, and some irreparably damaging information about his vengeful enemy Wennerström.

The Vanger family, as Blomkvist quickly learns, is a large, contentious clan whose members mostly detest one another. Their closets are crammed with skeletons, including Nazi party affiliations, domestic-violence incidents, and an alcohol-related drowning. Many of them lived on or near the family's island compound at the time of Harriet's disappearance in 1966 and still live there today. What made Harriet's vanishing so confounding was that it occurred when the island was closed off by a dramatic oil-truck accident on the single bridge into Hedestad, making it, as Blomkvist notes in a nod to the classic whodunit writer Dorothy Sayers, "a sort of locked-room mystery in island format." Though search parties repeatedly explored every inch of the island and coastline, no trace of the girl was ever found.

As soon as Blomkvist manages to turn up some new evidence, Salander is brought in by her security firm to be his research assistant, and up ratchets the action: the cold case turns hot, the chilly northern landscape goes from blanc to noir, and the Vanger family secrets begin to tumble. As they try to make sense of a situation that now threatens their lives, Salander and Blomkvist make a most unlikely duo -- the methodical journalist and the unscrupulous hacker, the social conscience and the antisocial anarchist, the saddened older warrior and the furious young hellcat -- but their partnership, in its peculiarity, is all the charm and fire of this novel.

As a first-time crime novelist, Larsson was smart enough to figure out that much success depends on an artful juggle between giving information about his protagonists and withholding it. He plays this game well, offering tantalizing hints about, say, Salander's childhood or Blomkvist's failed marriage. The crucial puzzle in any first-rate novel, as Larsson understood, is the puzzle of human nature, and it's the richness of that mystery, more than the intricacies of its plot or the sophistication of its milieu, that powers this book. --Donna Rofkind

Donna Rifkind's reviews appear frequently in The Washington Post Book World and the Los Angeles Times. She has also been a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The American Scholar, and other publications. In 2006, she was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.