The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo   by Stieg Larsson

This work starts out astonishingly precise in detail and believability; it feels like a photorealistic depiction of real events, like the author actually carried out all the improbable actions. This continues most of the way through the work.

A magazine owner is forced to step back from his work following controversial reportage, and is picked up by the head of a family business to investigate a murder 50 years previously, on the family island at the time an accident blocked off the only exit; this is a ‘locked room mystery’. He runs into a computer hacker (she with the tattoo), and together they make a formidable team, a pair of eccentrics, fleshed out in wonderful detail with extensive back-stories. They solve the problem, uncovering a line of the family tree which carried out serial sadistic sex murders over a couple of generations, and victimized some of their own family members. One of them, presumed murdered, actually escaped and is alive and well in Australia. The last of the line of evil perpetrators is outed and commits suicide.

The story is incredibly well worked out, with each new revelation plausible, and the ongoing attention to detail never ceases.

But the story comes to a climax about 80% of the way through the book. There then unfolds a tenuously related story, and it takes a real force of will to actually continue to read the book after such a huge denouement. In fact, the last 20% is horrible, wholesale telling of events rather than showing them, and feels like it might have been written by a 16 year old. The contrast in writing style with the earlier parts of the book really is jarring.

It turns out that the enemy of the magazine which the protagonist owns and works for is an international money-laundering gangster (no more detail than that!), and out of nowhere the girl with the tattoo finds a mass of evidence to out him (she has a line into his personal laptop). The repercussions cause a collapse of the Swedish stock market. There really is little for the reader to care about at this point.

How to judge a book written by a translator (it was originally written in Swedish)? It is clear that the translation does a clean job of transferring the plot lines and physicality of the world across, but there is a slight feeling of dissociation with the human side: the prose is just a tiny bit robotic.

I give this a wide re-read factor margin because on the one hand I donʼt feel like I missed anything out on the first reading; all the minute detail was there and there is no room for misunderstanding. On the other hand it was an entertaining, engrossing read, so re-reading wouldnʼt be a bad thing.