** spoiler alert ** "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" is about the efforts by a journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, to solve a decades' old missing person case, which result in uncovering the trail of a sadistic serial murderer; about Blomkvist's efforts to expose, via his magazine, the dealings of a corrupt Swedish business tycoon; about the illegal activities of Lisbeth Salander (an extremely high-functioning autistic savant), both on her own behalf and in her attempt to assist Blomkvist; and about sexual promiscuity and excessive coffee consumption. The bottom line is this: It's a far better book than YOU could ever write, but not nearly as good as the very worst of Updike or Nabokov or Heller.


"The Girl Who Played With Fire" is about the extensive but inept efforts of the Swedish police to capture the perpetrator of a triple murder; about the efforts of Lisbeth Salander, who is falsely accused of those murders, to elude the police, while also eluding the real murderer; about Mikael Blomkvist's efforts to prove Lisbeth's innocence; about Lisbeth's hunt to find and kill her gangster father for a multitude of crimes that have impacted her life; and about sexual promiscuity and excessive coffee consumption. The bottom line is this: It's a far better book than YOU could ever write, but not nearly as good as the very worst of Hammett or Chandler, or Ross Macdonald.


"The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest" is about Lisbeth Salander's long recovery from injuries sustained during her failed effort to kill her father; about the path to her eventual triumph in court while on trial for lesser charges; about her various criminal activities, including the "elimination" of some of her adversaries; about the efforts by Blomkvist, and others, to expose the activities of a top-secret "Section" hidden inside Sweden's national Security Police; and about sexual promiscuity and excessive coffee consumption. The bottom line is this: It's a bit unsettling to read this trilogy which absolutely DRIPS with a bizarre version of ultra feminism-- ironically written by a male writer who can't quite resist including numerous, extensively detailed accounts of extreme violence against women, and whose alter ego in the story, Blomkvist, has an effect on most women similar to that of James Bond-- only to ultimately realize that "equality between the sexes," in this author's mind, merely means that it's implicitly "OK" when a woman dishes out similar examples of cruelty and death, if done in the guise of vigilantism.