Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 12 years and 11 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him.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.
Today I finished reading “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson, the first book of his Millennium series.
Recently disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is approached by industrialist Henrik Vanger to write a book about the Vanger Family history in return for information that can clear his name. The book is just a cover story (pardon the pun) for Henrik’s ulterior motive for Blomkvist: solve the mystery of his niece’s disappearance over 40 years ago.
Blomkvist ends up diving into decades of Vanger family history, genealogical details, police records, photos, etc. In the course of his investigation under the guise of research for the book, he makes a few friends (and enemies!) of the various Vanger family members. Eventually his path crosses with Lisbeth Salander, an eccentric, tattooed hacker in her twenties with a photographic memory and a troubled past. With Lisbeth’s research and hacking skills, the duo is able to dig deeper into the mystery of Harriet’s disappearance and discover that not everyone wants the mystery solved.
As Swedish murder/mystery/tech thrillers go, this one is pretty good. 😉 It obviously takes place in Sweden, so there were a lot of strange (to me) names and places, but they just added to the mystique of the novel. There are a lot of characters, especially with the generations of Vangers involved, but luckily Larsson includes a family tree at the front of the book for easy reference.
Larsson originally intended the Millennium series to be 10 books but he died before completing the fourth so it’s now known as the Millennium Trilogy. The books were made into movies in Sweden (I plan on checking them out on Netflix streaming) and there will apparently be an American remake released later this year.
I read that book too and two others after it… great reading movies are good too but have subtitles…
There’s a leaked trailer for the new American version of the movie floating around now.
I finished watching the Swedish movie streaming on Netflix and it was pretty good. There were a few minor changes and things left out, but for the most part it was true to the book. I didn’t even mind reading the Swedish subtitles.
I finally got around to watching the 2011 movie with Daniel Craig. It’d obviously been a long time (almost 10 years!) since I read the book, but it was fun to watch the movie and remember all the characters and plot twists. It’s a bit long at just under 3 hours, but it’s pretty true to the book except for a few minor changes. I was actually surprised it wasn’t Americanized at all and still took place in Sweden. It has an 87% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes but apparently did poorly at the box office so the remaining two movies weren’t made. There was a “reboot” in 2018 with “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” with different actors but that was apparently not that good either.