Written by Stieg Larson
Published in North America (English Translated Edition) June 23, 2009
An intriguing Swedish novel that balooned into a massive bestseller, 'DRAGON TATTOO' is the story of Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced financial journalist who is hired by an ancient milionaire to sove abe thirty year old murder case of his niece Harriet. The girl with the 'Dragon Tattoo' (Lisbeth Salander) is a angyr, super smart girl that has a story that runs paralell with that of Mikael until she runs into him in the last 3rd of the book to solve the murder mystery.
Stieg takes his time to get the novel going, but keeps things going at a brisk pace. He suceeds at making the seemingly uninteresting runnings of a magazine crackle with page turning intensity. The actual murder mystery is much more interesting at first, before it devolves into an
uninteresting cinematic twist and climax that then devolves into an even more obvious audience pleasing double twist. Luckily, the two main characters are vivid enough to keep us interested.
The main story actually ends with 100 pages to go and the rest of the novel is made up of tying the loose ends presented the first act. It gives us more time with the interesting set of characters, but really leaves to be desired from a structural stand point. It could easily have been wrapped up in ten pages.
I look forward to the follow-up, but hope that Stieg learned his lesson and kept things focused in the second part, which seems unlikely, seeing that the poor man died before any of these books we're published (And possibly...edited?)
NOTE: The penguin paperback is a MASSIVE 800 + pages due to the fact that it's published in an elongated format with massive spacing and font. Is this supposed to make it slicker?
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