The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
The recap
Mikael Blomkvist, co-owner of the crusading Stockholm magazine Millennium, has just lost a libel case against a powerful financier and faces a short prison sentence and professional disgrace. Then comes an unusual offer: Henrik Vanger, the aging patriarch of a wealthy industrial dynasty, wants him to spend a year on Hedeby, the island where much of the clan lives, looking into the disappearance of his grandniece Harriet, who vanished during a family gathering nearly forty years earlier. Vanger is convinced that someone inside his own fractious, secretive clan is responsible. Blomkvist's research eventually crosses paths with Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant, guarded young hacker with a fierce moral code and every reason to distrust institutions. Larsson combines a classic closed-circle puzzle with financial journalism, Nordic winter atmosphere and an unflinching look at violence against women. The pace builds slowly before turning relentless, and Salander, prickly and unforgettable, became one of the defining characters of modern crime fiction.
Why read it
For crime fans who enjoy a slow-burn investigation with real-world bite, and for anyone who wants to meet one of fiction's most original investigators.
Fun facts
- 01
Larsson died suddenly of a heart attack in November 2004, aged 50, before any of his Millennium novels had been published; they appeared posthumously starting in 2005.
- 02
Larsson, chief editor of the anti-racist magazine Expo from 1999, decided around 2002 to try his hand at fiction and wrote the novels in the evenings after work, largely for his own pleasure.
- 03
As a journalist, Larsson became an expert on Sweden's far-right and neo-Nazi movements, and his reporting made him a frequent target of death threats.
- 04
The novel's original Swedish title, Män som hatar kvinnor, translates as Men Who Hate Women.
