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|  | Author: Stieg Larsson
Creator: Reg Keeland
Publisher: Renouf Pub Co Ltd
List Price: $32.00
Buy New: $31.98
as of 3/11/2010 22:57 CST details
You Save: $0.02
New (7) Used (9) from $27.90
Seller: chrisman09
Rating:  874 reviews
Sales Rank: 1932264
Format: Import
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 465
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.7
ISBN: 0670069019
Dewey Decimal Number: 839.738
EAN: 9780670069019
ASIN: 0670069019
Publication Date: September 25, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW DIRECT FROM PUBLISHER!!! MULTIPLE COPIES AVAILABLE!!! SHIPS IMMEDIATELY!!! Possible Remainder.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 11-15 of 874
 A series of convenient events March 6, 2010
H. Oller (Chamblee, GA United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is engaging enough that most readers will probably enjoy it, but it left a lot wanting for me. I'll try to do a spoiler free critic.
There are two main characters in this story: Mikael Blomkvist, the honorable middle-aged journalist who is forced to take a job playing super-sleuth, and Lisbeth Salander, a social outcast and brilliant young hacker. Almost inevitably these two meet up and work together to solve a decades old mystery concerning the disappearance of a young woman and to bring down a powerful, corrupt businessman. The mystery they must solve was the highlight of the book for me. It was at times intensely interesting, but at other times extremely frustrating and ultimately anti-climactic. I stopped reading the book for a few weeks after the mystery was solved, partially because I was let down by the resolution and partially because I was not terribly interested in the secondary storyline of the corrupt businessman. I had to push my way through to the end. While the ending is an obvious segway to the next book, it left me with no desire to continue reading the series.
My biggest criticism of the book is how arranged everything feels. The characters came off as rather two-dimensional and more like puppets being set up and moved around for the sake of the story. A lot of horrible things happen to a number of the characters in this book, but I felt the author did not fully explore the effects these events had on the characters. Another problem I had was that there are too many convenient characters and situations to allow for anything interesting to happen.
In the end I'd say that I left this book feeling shocked by the events in the book, as well as shocked by the character's actions and reactions relating to these events. I wouldn't particularly recommend this book to anyone, but I think readers who enjoy a good mystery and thrills without any emotional depth will probably really like this book.
For Kindle readers: There were a few mistakes, but overall the formatting is good. No problems reading this on Kindle.
 Strange...riveting...action-packed March 6, 2010
Elizabeth H. Cottrell (Shenandoah Valley, VA USA)
Wow, what a strange, riveting book...plot and characters all deliciously complex and the pace quite galloping. At least two nights, I stayed up way past my bedtime because I couldn't put it down. Intrigue, dysfunction, macabre scenarios, religion, sex, occult, murder, fraud, high level electronic espionage...amazing.
Graphic but Great March 6, 2010
V. Wright (Jacksonville, FL)
I was alerted to this author through a review I read in a magazine. I loved it and so did my husband. What a thrill ride.
Great title! March 5, 2010
N. Leviton (USA)
This is a really terrific book. I had pretty well stopped reading mysteries, since they can be hackneyed and easy to guess. Not this one! I want to read his other books as well. This was a excellent read.
 Not the great novel advertised as March 5, 2010
Jeffrey Penny
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has received some new attention in America cause of the imminent release of a very well regarded film adaptation. The book has seemed dimilarly well regarded. However, I found it to be something of a disappointment.
At the heart of the book there's an interesting mystery. Harriet Vanger, the young member of a family of industrialist misanthropes with Nazi tendencies, disappears off of her families isolated island home in the midst of a family retreat, her body is never found. Forty years later her aged uncle hires disgraced journalist Mikael Blomquist to make a last stab at finding out what happened to her. He eventually comes to be helped by a young punk hacker and freelance private investigator, Lisbeth Salander. The mystery is an interesting one, although the general solution to it will be an obvious option for most readers. Blomquist describes it as a "locked room murder mystery on an Island" since a series of events prevented anyone from getting to or from the island at the time the girl disappeared.
Unfortunately, Larson isn't a very good writer. Perhaps some of this is simply a fault of the English translation. The Swedish version may be far more lyrical in presentation. However there are other problems. One of them is the framing device. It takes over a hundred pages before Blomquist really begins to work on the case of the missing girl. Much of this hundred pages is spent delving into minute detail about Blomquist's fued with a corrupt industrialist. A feud which resulted in Blomquist being convicted of criminal libel. Furthermore the fate of Harriet Vanger is revealed with about another hundred pages to go. Those pages are used in a very boring and self congratulatory telling of how Blomquist resolves the feud. Larson is a journalist, a magazine editor like his hero Blomquist, and it's clear that he's living out some of his own fantasies here of the crusading journalist who makes good and changes the world. These sections also serve as a clearinghouse for some of Larson's gripes about the nature of the media, particularly financial reporters, in Sweden. All of this makes for rather boring reading. If Larson wanted to write a story about financial journalism then that is one thing. The mini series State of Play did a fantastic job of delivering an engaging story about newspapermen at work. Yet here it comes off rather dull, tedious, and over detailed.
Furthermore many of the characters are very thinly sketched. We learn a little bit about Blomquist, but not too much. Other than his on-again-off-again relationship with his married publishing partner there's nothing unusual about Blomquist. We're not shown that he's particularly brilliant or talented or diligent and we're not given access to any real hopes, desires, dreams or demons he might have. He just seems to exist. In the hands of a more skilled and thoughtful writer this might be workable as a theme. Various stories have involved discussions of very ordinary and uninvolved people. But that doesn't happen here. Blomquist has a desire to see his magazine return to profitability and respectability and would like to get revenge on his rival Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, but it doesn't seem to dominate his life. The apparent destruction of his journalistic career seems to inspire neither rage or nor any great sadness in him. He merely accepts it. At his libel trial Blomquist never puts up a defense, something that a number of characters ask about, and this is indicative of the character as a whole. He never seems to do much or react to much. Again, in more skilled hands this might mean something as we might explore a Blomquist who is dead but comes alive over the course of the novel. But this doesn't exist.
Lisbeth Salander, the second protagonist, is more thoroughly sketched. A punk computer hacker, she is a ward of the state who makes her money doing freelance private investigating work. Salander, while a talented hacker, is antisocial in the extreme, and filled with rage at the world around her. She's described by one character as being "the perfect victim" and clearly was the victim of some sort of horrible mistreatment. The problem with Salander is that she's too well sketched. Or rather, that Larson spends enough time describing her antisocial side and no time describing any other side. I found myself coming out of the novel with a deep loathing for Salander. For instance, she is someone who is fanatical about her own personal privacy, erecting boundaries that she refuses to let others cross, but who thinks nothing of snooping into the lives, and computers, of others. Larson also portrays her as a complete misanthrope, and yet there's the sense that we're supposed to agree with her when she thinks other people are idiots for wanting to do things differently than her. Inexplicably a number of characters also seem attracted to her, either romantically or paternally, or, creepily enough in a novel that has major themes about sexual violence against women, both. Yet we're never shown why anyone would like Salander or tolerate her presence for more than a few minutes. The only times I felt any connection to her was when she violently punished some rapists. Finally, there's another creepy aspect. Salander ends up in a sexual relationship with Blomquist, a man many years her senior and who is obviously a stand in for the author. In a book which deals with themes of the sexual exploitation of, and violence against, women, it's rather creepy that the author would involve a fictionalized version of himself in a relationship with a rape victim who is young enough to be his daughter. And the relationship with Blomquist seems to be based on nothing. Salander is portrayed as a thorough misanthrope who hates most people instantly. Yet she likes Blomquist for no real reason. There's no clear indiciation of why we, or Salander, should consider Blomquist any different from anyone else whose path she has crossed, especially her boss Dragan Armansky who is portrayed as nearly identical to Blomquist in that he has both a fatherly and a sexual interest in Salander.
There's also things that get left out. The pacing of the mystery is a bit off. When it begins to get cracked open it cracks open very rapidly. At the same time there's extended passages about rather mundane things. Do we really need to know every step Blomquist takes and every person he talks to in tracking down someone who took a picture on the day the crime took place? Also, we don't get a lot of development of the victim herself. Despite being the center of the novel, and the obsession of her uncle for forty years, she's pretty much a cipher. The novel also, by casting a serial killer as one of the main players, ironically perhaps gives a distorted impression about violence against women since most women who are subjected to violence are not the victims of sadistic strangers, but rather men who they know. Finally, there's an interesting thread that Larson doesn't really do anything with. Both Blomquist, Salander, and the killer who they track down, are investigators of a sort: Blomquist a reporter, Salander a private investigator and personal snoop, and the killer a serial kidnapper who methodically stalks and investigates his victims. Yet this idea is left unexplored. There's no real investigation of what investigation means to these people. Of why they feel drawn to finding things out and solving mysteries. Also, for a book which is, on many levels, fundamentally about violence against women (the original Swedish title is "Men Who Hate Women", the novel doesn't really discuss much about the nature of violence against women or patriarchy in society. It's presented more as a catalog of horrors.
Showing reviews 11-15 of 874
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