Genre
Fiction – Swedish, contemporary, thriller, mystery
Escape experience
You are athletically slim, can eat anything and everything (we’re talking beer and pizza every night) and not gain an ounce. You sport an asymmetrical ‘do, tat’s and body piercings, and rock a black leather motorcycle jacket and skinny jeans like nobody’s business. You are fierce, fearless and frighteningly intelligent. You can hack into any computer hooked up to the Internet to ferret out a person's most sordid secrets. When you are wronged, you never play the victim; you always settle the score.
Read this if you’re into…
Watching CNBC and pouring over the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times; long, solitary, contemplative jogs through snow-covered woods that skirt the Arctic Circle; Stockholm; shopping at Ikea; Swedish meatballs, heavy metal music and sandwiches (seriously, the protagonists of this book eat an awful lot of sandwiches); and secretly wishing you could sport body piercings and Goth gear with panache
Plot
Mikael Blomkvist has been set up, charged and convicted of publishing a fraudulent article about corrupt financier Hans-Erik Wennerström. His reputation as an investigative journalist is shattered and his financial journal Millenium teeters on the brink of ruin. In a desperate attempt to salvage the situation, Mikael resigns his post as publisher and reluctantly accepts an intriguing proposal from financier Henrik Vanger to investigate the disappearance of his niece Harriet – a mystery that has haunted Vanger for 42 years. This decision draws Mikael into a nightmare world, where evil lurks behind a thin veneer of pedigree and propriety.
Pace: Reading this is like…
Running at break-neck speed on treacherous ice and sleet-covered roads wearing a pair of clunky, hard-soled combat boots with worn-out tread. Blindfolded.
Cast of characters
- Mikael Blomkvist – Hard-nosed investigative journalist and publisher of the financial journal Millenium, Mikael is an idealist and crusader for the oppressed and the down-trodden.
- Lisbeth Salander – Freelance surveillance agent and private investigator under contract with Milton Securities, nonconformist Lisbeth is brilliant (able to hack into any computer or electronic device via the web), reticent (she rarely speaks but when she does, she’s brutally direct and uncannily insightful) and fierce (scarred by a violent past, with ghosts that haunt her present and threaten her future) – one of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction.
- Henrik Vanger – Retired CEO of Vanger Corporation, a former leader of Sweden’s industrial markets, Henrik is a manipulative old charmer and the pater familias of a hornet’s nest of avarice, malice and deceit.
- Nils Bjurman – Lisbeth’s legal guardian and evil incarnate
- Erika Berger – Mikael’s lover and editor-in-chief of Millenium
Books in the series
You might also like…
- Carol O’Connell – Mallory’s Oracle
- Natsuo Kirino – Out
- Henning Mankell – Faceless Killers
