Intelligent, complex, with a gripping plot and deeply intriguing characters. The author's early death is a great loss' Philip Pullman, Guardian. 'As vivid as bloodstains on snow' Lee Child. 'What a cracking novel! I haven't read such a stunning thriller debut for years. Brilliantly written and totally gripping' Minette Walters. 'I doubt you will read a better book this year' Val McDermid. 'So much more than a thriller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a dazzling novel of big ideas' Harlan Coben. 'Brilliantly written the characters are superbly drawn and the story grips from first to last' Mail On Sunday. 'A rip-roaring serial-killer adventure' Mail on Sunday. 'An utterly fresh political and journalistic thriller that is also intimate and moral a feast of a book' Michael Ondaatje. 'The books are selling in their millions across Europe and it's not hard to see why' Spectator. 'The ballyhoo is fully justified the novel scores on every front' The Times. A publishing sensation who seemingly came from nowhere crime fiction has seldom needed to salute and mourn such a stellar talent as Larsson's in the same breath' Sunday Times. Just when I was thinking there wasn't anything new on the horizon, along comes Stieg Larsson with this wonderfully unique story. I was completely absorbed' Michael Connelly.

First U.S. publication for a deceased Swedish author (1954 - 2004); this first of his three novels, a bestseller in Europe, is a labored mystery.It's late 2002. Mikael Blomkvist, reputable Stockholm financial journalist, has just lost a libel case brought by a notoriously devious tycoon. He's looking at a short jail term and the ruin of his magazine, which he owns with his best friend and occasional lover, Erika Berger. The case has brought him to the attention of Henrik Vanger, octogenarian, retired industrialist and head of the vast Vanger clan. Henrik has had a report on him prepared by Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous Girl, a freaky private investigator. The 24-year-old Lisbeth is a brilliant sleuth, and no wonder: She's the best computer hacker in Sweden. Henrik hires Mikael to solve an old mystery, the disappearance of his great-niece Harriet, in 1966. Henrik is sure she was murdered; every year the putative killer tauntingly sends him a pressed flower on his birthday (Harriet's custom). He is equally sure one of the Vangers is the murderer. They're a nasty bunch, Nazis and ne'er-do-wells. There are three story lines here: The future of the magazine, Lisbeth's travails (she has a sexually abusive guardian) and, most important, the Harriet mystery. This means an inordinately long setup. Only at the halfway point is there a small tug of excitement as Mikael breaks the case and enlists Lisbeth's help. The horrors are legion: Rape, incest, torture and serial killings continuing into the present. Mikael is confronted by an excruciating journalistic dilemma, resolved far too swiftly as we return to the magazine and the effort to get the evil tycoon, a major miscalculation on Larsson's part. The tycoon's empire has nothing to do with the theme of violence against women which has linked Lisbeth's story to the Vanger case, and the last 50 pages are inevitably anticlimactic.Juicy melodrama obscured by the intricacies of problem-solving. (Kirkus Reviews)