Title: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Author: Stieg Larsson
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Pages: 554
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
This was a book I’d been meaning to read for a long time. It concerns the theme of domestic violence and sexual assault. The book is divided into several parts; each part is preceded by damning statistics relating to violence against women.
The book starts with a single pressed flower, framed and delivered year after year, to an old man on the 1st of November, his birthday.
Journalist Mikael Blomkvist has been indicted and fined for a story he wrote on the unscrupulous dealings of businessman Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. The court holds him guilty of defamation, sentencing him to three months in prison and directing him to pay a heavy fine.
Meanwhile aged business magnate Henrik Vagner offers him an interesting assignment: to discover the fate of his oldest brother’s granddaughter, Harriet, who disappeared from Heddeby, the island they called home, in 1966, when she was just 16. Vagner is afraid that one of his relatives has done harm to Harriet. But, if so, Harriet's body had never been found, and the case had turned cold. Out of a job, Mikael decides to take on the assignment.
Vagner has also retained the services of Lisbeth Salander, an enigmatic and dangerous security investigator and hacker. Will the team of Mikael and Lisbeth successfully solve the decades-old mystery of Harriet’s disappearance?
The book is written in the 3rd person past tense PoV of Mikael and Lisbeth. For the greater part of the book, both these characters are unknown to each other. They don’t meet under Chapter 18, at page 305. Things heat up for the investigation from this point onwards.
The events relate to a period from the 20th of December of one year to the end of the next.
There were so many characters in the book that I had to keep referring to the Family Tree. The fact that there are 23 potential suspects on an island meant that it was hard to keep all the relationships straight in my head. It doesn’t help that there are more than one Gunnar, Birgir etc.
The scenes describing the rape were extremely disturbing and would be triggering for the vulnerable. Also, at the risk of treading on spoiler territory, there was one character, Eva, a dentist who was Martin’s girlfriend, on whom we never got any closure.
I would have liked this book better if it had shed some weight. There’s precious little happening in the first 200-odd pages.
The Prologue uses up a lot of pages to build up an element that gets explained in a few small paragraphs later on.
Also, the part relating to the doings of Wennerstrom comes after the mystery relating to Harriet has been resolved. By then, I felt a sense of fatigue after wading through this door stopper of a book, and I had almost lost interest in Wennerstrom. If only the two subplots had been dealt with concurrently.
Apparently, the original title of the book was Men Who Hate Women. That title made far more sense than this one that jumps on the back of the Girl trend.
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