The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist facing prison after losing a libel suit against the industrialist Hans Erik Wennerstrom, takes a private assignment from the elderly Henrik Vanger: find out what really happened to Vanger's grandniece Harriet, who vanished from the family's island estate forty years earlier. Blomkvist is joined, reluctantly at first, by Lisbeth Salander, a young investigator with a photographic memory, a history of state guardianship and abuse, and almost no capacity for trust. Their research through old photographs and family records leads them to Harriet's brother Martin, who has spent decades secretly murdering women, having learned the habit from their father Gottfried, and Martin nearly kills Blomkvist before Salander intervenes and Martin dies fleeing the scene. The two investigators discover Harriet did not die at all: she fled the family and has lived for decades in Australia under another name, and she returns briefly to help stabilize the family company. In a second thread that has been running quietly under the main mystery the whole time, Salander digs up evidence against Wennerstrom that goes far beyond what Blomkvist had originally been sued over, and hands it to him without explanation, letting him publish an exposé that destroys Wennerstrom and restores both Blomkvist's reputation and the magazine, Millennium, that he half owns.

Larsson buries a furious argument about violence against women, present in the book's original Swedish title, inside what otherwise reads as a fast, satisfying procedural, and the combination of forensic patience and real anger gives the book a charge that several reviewers found more compelling than its prose, which some called clipped or occasionally flavorless in translation.