Juicy melodrama obscured by the intricacies of problem-solving.
First U.S. publication for a deceased Swedish author (1954–2004); this first of his three novels, a bestseller in Europe, is a labored mystery.
It’s late 2002. Mikael Blomkvist, reputable Stockholm financial journalist, has just lost a libel case brought by a notoriously devious tycoon. He’s looking at a short jail term and the ruin of his magazine, which he owns with his best friend and occasional lover, Erika Berger. The case has brought him to the attention of Henrik Vanger, octogenarian, retired industrialist and head of the vast Vanger clan. Henrik has had a report on him prepared by Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous Girl, a freaky private investigator. The 24-year-old Lisbeth is a brilliant sleuth, and no wonder: She’s the best computer hacker in Sweden. Henrik hires Mikael to solve an old mystery, the disappearance of his great-niece Harriet, in 1966. Henrik is sure she was murdered; every year the putative killer tauntingly sends him a pressed flower on his birthday (Harriet’s custom). He is equally sure one of the Vangers is the murderer. They’re a nasty bunch, Nazis and ne’er-do-wells. There are three story lines here: The future of the magazine, Lisbeth’s travails (she has a sexually abusive guardian) and, most important, the Harriet mystery. This means an inordinately long setup. Only at the halfway point is there a small tug of excitement as Mikael breaks the case and enlists Lisbeth’s help. The horrors are legion: Rape, incest, torture and serial killings continuing into the present. Mikael is confronted by an excruciating journalistic dilemma, resolved far too swiftly as we return to the magazine and the effort to get the evil tycoon, a major miscalculation on Larsson’s part. The tycoon’s empire has nothing to do with the theme of violence against women which has linked Lisbeth’s story to the Vanger case, and the last 50 pages are inevitably anticlimactic.
Juicy melodrama obscured by the intricacies of problem-solving.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26975-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
What dire secret could make Lainie Smith, Seattle's well- heeled answer to Mother Teresa, vulnerable to blackmail? Whatever it is, it's something she's been paying $2,000 a week to keep quiet—and something she doesn't want to share with her lawyer, Kathy Birchfield, or Kathy's husband, private eye Thomas Black (The Million-Dollar Tattoo, 1996, etc.). Thomas doesn't insist on knowing Lainie's secret, but as he gets deeper into the case- -trailing the two men who pick up the latest two grand, searching the lair he's tracked one of them to, dispensing his trademark similes (one craven suspect has ``an alibi prepared like a frozen dinner in the freezer'')—he can hardly help finding out what it is. And it's dynamite, something it's no wonder Lainie didn't want him to know: Seventeen years ago she was present with recently executed Charlie Groth when four friends vacationing in a cabin on Whidbey Island were massacred. Was Lainie, as she quaveringly maintains, only a drugged-out witness to her boyfriend's madness? How deep does her complicity go? And how did her blackmailers get the goods on her? Most of the people who could answer these questions are dead—and now more, it seems, are following them. The nightmare that haunts Lainie's past is so horrific that Thomas's fans will surely overlook the slapdash details of its exhumation (suspects suddenly tripping over each other in their haste to clear themselves) in his grimmest outing in years. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-345-40068-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
"The worst things happened to Jury's women," muses his friend Melrose Plant all too accurately. The victim this time is Supt. Richard Jury's former lover Lady Jennifer Kennington, suspected first of shooting actress Verna Dunn, then two weeks later strangling Dorcas Reese, homely kitchen girl at Fengate, the residence of Verna's ex-husband Max Owen. Jury's first idea- -prying Plant loose from his litigious aunt's nuisance suit against inoffensive secondhand-shopkeeper Ada Crisp to send him undercover to Lincolnshire as the antiques appraiser who'll help evaluate Max's treasures—yields lots of data about Max, his understanding wife Grace, his sculptor nephew Jack Price, and their neighbors Major Linus Parker and Peter Emery, his blind groundskeeper. But despite the data, there are precious few conclusions. And when Jury confronts Jenny directly, she simply admits an undeniable motive for killing Verna and expands on the lies she's already told the police. So it's on to the courtroom, where procedural fireworks await. As always with Grimes (Hotel Paradise, 1996, etc.), the pace is leisurely, at times maddeningly so; yet the endless repetitions of the case's central questions—what was Dorcas so sorry she'd listened to and done? why did she tell her trusted intimates she was pregnant when she wasn't? why were the two murders committed with different weapons?—actually deepen their mystery instead of dispelling it. Even the farcical subplot—that nuisance lawsuit back home- -adds its counterweight to the Fen Country gloom to produce Grimes's best book in years.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-5620-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
