Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Review

There have been some seriously mixed reviews about this book, The Girl Who With The Dragon Tattoo, which seem to centre on what people are expecting from it when they by it. It's been tagged as a thinking person's crime novel and so I think a lot of people have bought it expecting it to be a serious piece of literature. While it is definitely one of the best crime books I have read, at the end of the day it's still a crime book and anyone who doesn't usually like the genre should probably steer clear.



It's exceptionally well written and very long for which me is a bonus - definitely value for money on the word-to-cost ratio. The author, who sadly died before seeing the success of his books, goes to great lengths to round out the characters with personal histories which makes it a rich read.



The tale is based in the murky world of big business in Sweden (yes there is big business there; think Volvo, SAAB, ABB, IKEA) and the personal dynamic between a disgraced investigative journalist, a asperger-suffering computer hacker and the patriarch of one of Sweden's richest families who is near death and wants to know what happened to his niece who disappeared nearly 30 years before.



There are a good 20 sub-plots within the novel but they all tie in in the end to the main story. Again some of the reviews of the book have complained that the book is long-winded but that for me is part of the joy of this book.



Definitely recommended as a good beach of plane read and with two more books in the trilogy the author wrote before he died there is plenty more joy to go.