The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson begins by introducing us to Mikael Blomkvist a financial investigative journalist. He has been sentenced to serve 3 months jail time and a monetary fine for libel against a crooked billionaire, Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. Before he begins his jail sentence he is approached by a Henrik Vanger to research the death of his niece who has been missing for 40 years. Vanger offers Blomkvist a large sum of money and tells him he has a year to figure out the mystery of what happened to his niece, Harriet Vanger. After the year Vanger says he will provide Blomkvist with the necessary information to take down Hans-Erik Wennerstrom.
The novel also follows the life of Lisbeth Salander, a tattooed and pierced young women whom he tracks down after discovering she had hacked into his computer. Lisbeth is tough as nails and takes no crap form anyone, despite appearing mentally handicapped. If you wrong her you better watch out, she will get revenge. With Lisbeth's help he begins to uncover more that just the mystery of one young girls disappearance.
After reading this book I saw that the original title was Men Who Hate Women, which I think would have been much more appropriate. Throughout the book there is violence, often sexual, against women, which turns out to be a recurring theme in the book. The book also gives statistic's on violent acts commited against women in Sweden. It made me very glad I don't live in Sweden.
The beginning of the book gets off to a slow start, but after getting through all the initial background on Blomkvist and Lisbeth the story really gets interesting. At times it is difficult to keep track of all the members of the Vanger family. I think a family tree outline would have been helpful, but overall it was a very good read and I am planning on reading the next two books in the series.
