The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first of a three part so called Millennium series by the late Stieg Larsson who died shortly after he submitted the manuscript of what has now become an international bestseller.

The story is mostly about a middle-aged journalist, Blomkvist who has plenty of luck with women and a grown woman Salander who is stuck in a body of a thirteen-year-old and seems to have misguided sartorial taste on Goth, body piercings and tattoos. Together they discover dark family secrets, find missing persons, catch serial killers, expose financial gangsters and what have you. They share a passion for Apple products, hers a Powerbook (she likes it so much so that she gives a blowjob in exchange for money to buy one) and his an iBook (no blowjob mentioned), in between all these activities, they have sex and drink a lot of coffee.

The paperback is almost 600-page thick and the story is well paced, organized and plotted. Every little thing is explained (Remember the TV series Lost? Anybody? Where nothing is really explained and people have so low an expectation that they actually don't expect the finale answers every stupid convoluted clues left before. Ha?). Overall I like the story except I always have some prejudice against translated works. I keep thinking what's missing in the translated English version. Too bad, I don't read Sweden. Salander is supposed to be a world class hacker yet I don't really see her do any actual hacking. I expect the book to print verbatim what commands and source codes she uses to hack. Alas, there is none and I just have to take Larsson's word for it.