There are so many good mysteries coming out of Scandinavia these days. Mankell springs to mind immediately. Unfortunately, the author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo died of a massive heart attack in his early forties, before having a chance to amass a body of work. I would have very much enjoyed reading more of his mysteries.Journalist Carl Mikael Blomkvist, owner and founder of Millenium Magazine, has just lost a libel suit to a rather sleazy individual (we learn later he has been set up – no surprise. He is hired by Henrik Vanger, a rich industrialist, to discover who has been sending pressed flowers each year on his birthday. Each flower is different and often very rare. Blomkvist is ostensibly hired to write a history of the Vanger family, but his real task is to discover who killed Harriet many years ago. The police have given up; no body was ever discovered, and the island they lived on was completely sealed off because of an accident on the only bridge. It appears to be a classic locked-room mystery.
Blomkvist is aided in his investigations by Lisbeth Salander, a wispy, seemingly frail, independent investigator who, we discover, as the book unfolds, has a backbone of steel. There is a very disturbing undercurrent of misogyny and violence against women in this book that, I hope, does not reflect Swedish reality. Some of the characters are truly evil, and some scenes are not for the faint-hearted.
I recommend this to anyone enjoying a classic mystery populated with well-developed and appealing characters.
