Brilliant first part of the Stieg Larsson trilogy. All the customers I have recommended this to have really enjoyed it as much as I did. The only people I have come across who didn’t like it were some of the Warwick Books Book Group!
Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder – and that the killer is a member of his owntightly knit but dysfunctional family.
He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet’s disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vangers are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves.
One of the interesting things about the novel is that Stieg Larsson was himself an investigative journalist, the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Expo. He was a leading expert on anti-democratic, right-wing extremist organisations and he died in 2004, in rather mysterious circumstances according to some, soon after delivering the text of the novels that make up the Millennium Trilogy.
If you read this, you’ll want to read the whole trilogy..be warned, it is something of an epic!
