The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Two complex stories are woven seamlessly together--first, the mysterious disappearance 20 years ago of the daughter of one of Sweden's wealthiest families, and second, a tale of financial corruption and libel. Mikael Blomkvist, investigative journalist, and Lisbeth Salander, a genius hacker with a past, are the two central characters, with many more playing important parts. Simon Vance is outstanding, as is his narration. His voices are so natural and fit so well with their characters that the listener is completely transported into the story. Despite an unhurried tempo, the book never bogs down as the plot is untangled thread by thread. This production exemplifies an extraordinary match between book and narrator. S.S.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine


Two complex stories are woven seamlessly together--first, the mysterious disappearance 20 years ago of the daughter of one of Sweden's wealthiest families, and second, a tale of financial corruption and libel. Mikael Blomkvist, investigative journalist, and Lisbeth Salander, a genius hacker with a past, are the two central characters, with many more playing important parts. Simon Vance is outstanding, as is his narration. His voices are so natural and fit so well with their characters that the listener is completely transported into the story. Despite an unhurried tempo, the book never bogs down as the plot is untangled thread by thread. This production exemplifies an extraordinary match between book and narrator. S.S.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 14, 2008
Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family's remote island retreat north of Stockholm, nor do fiction debuts hotter than this European bestseller by muckraking Swedish journalist Larsson. At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden's dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title, Men Who Hate Women
), this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail for libeling a shady businessman, and the multipierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable superhacker. Hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, who wants to find out what happened to his beloved great-niece before he dies, the duo gradually uncover a festering morass of familial corruption—at the same time, Larsson skillfully bares some of the similar horrors that have left Salander such a marked woman. Larsson died in 2004, shortly after handing in the manuscripts for what will be his legacy. 100,000 first printing.