|
"People always have secrets. It's just a matter of finding out what they are." J When we first meet Mikael in 2005's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he's a middle-aged financial reporter whose career has gone straight into the dumpster, thanks to a conviction for libelling a high-flying Swedish tycoon and a pending jail sentence. But another powerful but aging Swedish businessman offers him a way out -- if Mikael agrees to look into a seriously cold case involving the disappearance of a teen heiress, his brother's granddaughter, almost forty years ago. What can a potential jailbird out to clear his name and reputation do but jump at the chance? With the unexpected help of Lisbeth, the tattooed girl of the title, a troubled young investigator with a photographic memory and more emotional luggage than anyone should carry, Mikael begins to dig into the case, and soon unearths a wriggling mass of deep dark and disturbing family secrets that wouldn't be out of place in a Ross Macdonald novel. But that's just part of this book's charms. At times it also reads like a something right out of the Silence of the Lambs school, and at other times it seems like we've wandered into an almost Ludlumesque paranoid world of omnipotent global and corpotrate corruption. And then there's Lisbeth's own very hands-on, almost Spillane-like approach to vengeance. Such a big, disjointed novel, with its wide range of characters and ever-shifting themes should be one whopping, unholy mess, with no business being as compelling and entertaining as it is. And yet, thanks to Larsson's considerable storytelling mojo, this rambling slab of a novel has became an international sensation, almost from the moment it was first published in Swedish in 2005, and that buzz has only spread around the globe, country by country and continent by continent, as it has been translated into one foreign language after another. Somehow this unlikely thriller has become one of the most compelling and bestselling crime novels of the decade. And the second and third novels in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006) and The Girl who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (2007), only upped the ante, with Mikael and Lisbeth -- who rarely even have physical contact with each other -- plow into the morass of Sweden's illicit sex industry, its social welfare system, its national security and legal and justice systems from different ends. Again, it's a scenario that shouldn't work, and yet... Part of the series' success, of course, is the backstory. The author, a graphic designer and the editor-in-chief at the Swedish antiracist magazine Expo, dropped dead of a heart attack in 2004, shortly after delivering the manuscripts for the first three books. The rumours are that part of a fourth novel and the synopses of the fifth and sixth books are also floating around. The three completed books have already been filmed in Sweden, and the first opened in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland in early 2009 to massive acclaim and popularity, setting box office records in Norway and Denmark for a Swedish film. Needless to say, Hollywood has also been sniffing around, with a big bucks Hollywood version set to hit the screens in the next few years. NOVELS
ALSO AVAILABLE
FILM
MOVIE NEWS YOU NEED
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith, with a little guidance from Mark Sullivan. | Home | Detectives A-L M-Z | Film | Radio | Television | Web Comics | Comics | FAQs | Drop a dime. Your comments, suggestions, corrections and contributions are always welcome.
|
