The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, Stieg Larsson

So I just finished this book last night and I can not wait until I can get my hands on the next one!! It was very well written and the story was interesting and well put together. I will say that even though it was a fantastic book this will definitely not be a teen read and some adults may not enjoy it as much as I did. The story involves sexual assault and a serial killer, I thought the author did a great job of presenting the information and situations without getting graphic. Basically it was a well written missing person murder mystery with a sophisticated sub plot. If you enjoy books by Sue Grafton, John Grisham, or David Baldacci then you will probably love this book.

Spoiler alert, I am not planning on giving away anything but each person is different when it come to what spoils a book for them so I will just say that from here on I am giving more details.

The basic story line is this; Mikael is a journalist who is being sued for libel, he is hired by the uncle of Harriet Vanger to solve the mystery surrounding her disappearance. The Vanger family is as soap opera as they get, each one of them comes off as pretty crazy and therefore suspect. Mikeal goes to live on the island that Harriet disappeared from 40 years ago, the uncle has made a life's work of trying to solve the case and so has a ridiculous amount of information for Mikeal to sift through. Mean while in a totally separate side story you read about Lisbeth Salander, she is a great character. She has an abusive guardian and the way she deals with him is just genius. She is a PI working for a security company, she was the agent that did the report on Mikeal for Harriet's uncle. Anyway she has a complex life and story line going when Mikeal brings her in as a research assistant. He soon learns that she has amazing hacking ability and together they stumble onto a serial killer, solve the mystery of Harriet and prove that Mikeal was wronged in the libel suite. They also hook up and Lisbeth falls in love with Mikael but he has some issues and the book ends without that being resolved. There were so many different side stories going on that I have missed at least a few, one main one though is that Lisbeth despises men who are abusive to women and this is an important key to her character.