Dan read and liked Bernadette's review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium, #1):

"I had low expectations of this book.

For a start there’s the hype. Due to past disappointments I am wary of multi-stickered, superlatively praised books.

Then there’s the fact it’s dauntingly huge. You can’t curl up in ...more I had low expectations of this book.

For a start there’s the hype. Due to past disappointments I am wary of multi-stickered, superlatively praised books.

Then there’s the fact it’s dauntingly huge. You can’t curl up in bed with it, or slip it in your bag to read on the go or hide it behind a folder during a dull meeting.

Finally when I skimmed the first few pages I saw talk of dodgy business dealings by an industrialist. There is no single subject guaranteed to send me to sleep faster than finance talk. Seriously, I would rather watch dirt bake in the sun.

However, it was selected for a book club read so I opened my mind a teensy bit and plunged in.

By about page 45, in spite of my gritty determination to remain nonplussed, I was hooked. Well and truly hooked. The book is tantalising in the way it introduces both themes and people. There’s a journalist who is successfully sued for publishing a defamatory article about a wealthy businessman and I sensed conspiracy theory. There’s an old man aching to discover what happened to his niece who disappeared from an island 40 years ago and I settled in for the ultimate locked room mystery. There’s a young, quirky investigator for a security firm and early on, even though I’ve no idea why, I was pretty sure I was going to want to kill someone on her behalf before the book was over.

All of the characters here, whether main player or walk-on, are fabulous. They’re imperfect, complex, intriguing and believable and their stories unfold in a very engaging way. Larsson jumps quickly between scenes and builds layers of tension and suspense deliciously. This is the best book I have read in a long time for creating that palpable need to read just one more page, and then just one more, and then…Honestly there were multiple points at which if my house had caught fire while reading I’d have ignored the smoke alarms and stayed to find out what happened next.

My one gripe is about the passages which stepped out of the brilliant narrative and became part text book, part political pamphlet: they are jarringly off-putting. For example, the story demonstrated exquisitely that placing a sane (if slightly odd) adult under formal guardianship is a truly grotesque thing to do to a human being. The addition of a several-page diatribe about the use of legal guardianship in a democratic state was unnecessary and removed value rather than adding anything. These sections of the book have a kind of proselytising zeal about them that infuriatingly interrupts the story. It's not that I disagree with his sentiment but I wish Larsson had had enough confidence to allow his wonderfully layered story and his rich, complex characters to speak for themselves. They’d have done a better job on their own.
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