61. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson

After a slow beginning (which may have been due more to my sporadic reading than the book itself), Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo turns into quite a page turner. I was up until 3 a.m. finishing it...although I'm usually up until around then anyway.

Swedish journalist Mikael Blomkvist, disgraced after being found guilty of libel, finds himself wooed by elderly industrialist Henrik Vanger. Vanger makes Blomkvist an offer he can't refuse: Spend a year researching Vanger's family, with the purpose of trying to learn the fate of Vanger's niece Harriet, who disappeared in 1966, for extremely lucrative pay, the chance to save the magazine Blomkvist helped found, and evidence that will ruin the man who sued him for libel. As Blomkvist begins to make headway on the old investigation, he hires punk hacker Lisbeth Salander as his research assistant. Together, they discover the Vanger family's dark secrets, which are far more horrifying and brutal than Henrik, or they, initially suspected.

Although the novel has been a runaway bestseller, I don't think it's for everyone. The characters inhabit a brutal world that includes serial murder, sadistic rape, and animal torture. Larsson writes of these horrors with a clinical detachment, and there's nothing gratuitous about the gore. Some of the characters emerge as admirable for their refusal to accept victimhood, regardless of what they experience. But some parts of the novel are still raw and difficult to read.*

I'm eager to read his next novel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, which I own, but I don't have money to buy the third in the trilogy yet. So I checked out the plots of both books on Wikipedia (I'm bad about that), and I'm still debating whether or not to wait until I can afford the last book before starting the middle one.

* I tend--and want--to think I have a pretty high tolerance for fictional violence, but that might not be true. I could only watch Pulp Fiction once. After reading Kiss the Girls, I swore off James Patterson forever, and I've also stopped reading Karin Slaughter. Maybe it's just certain types of explicit sexual violence that bother me, though, because I do like Cody McFadyen's books, and I've read nearly everything in print about the Black Dahlia murder. My own novel is quite violent, too; I had a lot of nightmares while I wrote it. So who knows?