Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged steig larsson
Books 19 & 20: The Girl Who…
Jul 20th 2010
Book 19: The Girl Who Played With Fire
Author: Stieg Larsson
Genre: Fiction (Crime/Mystery)
Pages: 630
Book 20: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest
Author: Stieg Larsson
Genre: Fiction (Crime/Mystery)
Pages: 576
Summary
A few weeks before Dag Svensson, a freelance journalist, plans to publish a story that exposes important people involved in Sweden’s sex trafficking business based on research conducted by his girlfriend, Mia Johansson, a criminologist and gender studies scholar, the couple are shot to death in their Stockholm apartment. Salander, who has a history of violent tendencies, becomes the prime suspect after the police find her fingerprints on the murder weapon. This launches Blomkvist on a journey into Salander’s past in an attempt to clear her name (if, in fact her name should be cleared).
Notes
These books really should be read as one unit. In fact, the end of The Girl Who Played With Fire is such an evil cliffhanger I would have been a little angry at having to wait for the third book to see what happened.
It’s very much in the same vein as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and if you liked reading that book you will enjoy these two as well. Pretty much everything I had to say in my previous review applies here as well. I was pleased to find that the issues with the translation that I had with the first book were largely gone.
Sadly, my “Oh come on!!!” computer hacking reactions were back here too.
Next Book
I feel behind a bit with my posting so I’ve just finished World War Z by Max Brooks, which will appear in a separate post.
Book 18: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Jun 21st 2010
Title: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Author: Stieg Larsson
Genre: Fiction (Crime/Mystery)
Pages: 608
Summary
Caught in a libel lawsuit, journalist Mikael Blomkvist is forced to take some time away from his magazine. At the beginning of his forced vacation he’s contacted by Henrik Vanger, a wealthy retired industrialist. The reason? The decades old disappearance of a young girl named Harriet, his great-niece. Charged with finding out what happened to her, Mikael is lead on a chase through the past, following a cold trail. Along the way he meets an unlikely partner, Lisbeth Salander, aka…the girl with the dragon tattoo.
Notes
I should preface this by stating this book does contain content dealing with sexually explicit issues if that sort of thing bugs you. Definitely a book for mature readers.
I found this book to be extremely enjoyable and engrossing (like the nice quote on the cover mentions). It’s very dense, packed with information and all sorts of Swedish names and places which I was largely unfamiliar with at first (I’m not really an expert on Sweden) so the beginning of the book was a bit slow. However, once the character introductions were out of the way things really evened out and the book gained momentum. I kept reading just to see what would happen next.
There were a couple things that bugged me though. First of all (minor spoilers ahead here. Nothing too big though), computer hacking was involved in the storyline and…well…it was more like the movie version of computer hacking than something that could actually happen. Considering I’m aware of how computer’s function, there were several “Oh come on! You can’t do that!” moments. The author also has a habit of describing in great detail the specifics of everybody’s computer hardware, which seemed a bit over detailed to me.
The second thing was the translation. Not that this can really be helped or anything, but at points the prose seemed to be fairly bland which made me wonder if this was how it read in the native Swedish version or if something got lost in the translation. It wasn’t something that carried through the entire book or anything. Just certain sections and made me wonder how it read in Swedish.
Next Book
I’m continuing onward with this trilogy, so my next book is The Girl Who Played With Fire to be followed by The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Then I’ll probably jump back to the next book of the Wheel of Time series.
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