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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Book #2 for 2012: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

I must have passed by this book a thousand times over the last 2, 3 years but it wasn't until I watched the heart-stopping trailer of its film adaptation that I decided to give this book a place on my bookshelf. Boy, disappointed I was not. 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first book of the Millennium Trilogy (the other two will be discussed in the coming posts). It is about a disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomkvist who found himself in an unexpected assignment to uncover the disappearance mystery of a girl some forty years ago. The task took an unexpected turns as the deeper he dug into the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, the more he uncovered the unpleasant side of top Swedish echelons where corruption and power abuse were rampant. 

Of course, to carry out the interesting task, he found himself a partner in the form of Lisbeth Salander, the tattooed genius and the femme fatale of the story. They found themselves uncovering one of the most well-kept secrets in the Vanger family with lots of actions and suspense in between.

Although the book has a dizzying cocktail of thousands of characters with long Swedish names thrown in (like reading the names of Ikea furniture), it was a complete pleasure to flip from one page to another as readers (like me) were totally drawn into the mystery and investigation. The language is simple (although it was translated from Swedish) and most of the plot are easy to understand and in chronological order. 

In a nutshell, reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a complete joy and totally made me a fan of thriller books now. 

I bought this one in Times, Pavilion with the movie tie-in cover.


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