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The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

ugh. Really? Really world? This is the kind of thing you buy by the dozen? (or so it seems)

Okay…let’s go with the positives. This was better than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The way that Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol was better than Police Academy: Mission to Moscow.

I like Lisabeth Salander — yeah, in many ways she’s cliched…but in enough ways she isn’t. The parts of the book that focused on her — not the investigation into her, but her, are far and away the best parts of the novel. Actually, if you cut away the rest of it — which is almost wholly dead weight, it’d be readable.

Now, the problems…well, some of them.

There are just too many characters. Well, there are too many names tied a quick description and some sort of quirk which supposed to equal characters. You could eliminate 30-50% of them and not do a darn thing to the plot.

There are plot lines that do nothing other than chew up space. The whole new job for Berger thing, for instance. Sure, this might come back to mean something in book 3, but I can’t see how.

There’s just too much wasted ink. We don’t need three paragraphs describing someone leaving the house to go get a hamburger and that’s it. Doesn’t advance the plot, doesn’t reveal anything about a character (other than to buttress the theory, based solely on this work, that all Swedes eat McDonald’s obsessively).

I had a laundry list of things to whine about–but who wants to read that (much less write it)? Let’s just leave it as, an over-written, over-long, dull book with one heckuva good, mostly wasted, character.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I honestly don’t know why it took me so long to get around to reading this little international phenomenon, it wasn’t because I didn’t have access, my sister loaned it to me months ago. Something just kept me from it, maybe it was fear of the bandwagon, who knows. It certainly has a strong following, almost Tha Da Vinci Code-like, more than one person saw me carrying it and had to talk about it, which never happens to me.

The one thing that we all agreed on was that it started slowly. Like cold molasses slow. It was either brave or foolhardy of Larsson to start off his book with a detailed and plodding description of a financial crime. Hardly the kind of thing that sucks you in. Not only that, that type of crime doesn’t seem to match up with the cited statistics about assaults on females in Sweden that are so prominent. When, after more than 200 pages into the novel, when we finally do get our first assault on a female, it comes across as perfunctory.

The book follows the path of 2 protagonists–Mikael Blomkvist, a financial reporter with a superiority complex, and Lisbeth Salander, a young investigator for a security company whose talents far exceed her appearance and age. Blomkvist is in the middle of some legal trouble, which has forced him out of the news biz for awhile, so he takes a job researching a decades-old missing-persons case for an aged, reclusive industrialist. Salander’s dealing with her own legal and personal issues, and apparently the near universal belief that horribly thin girls with tattoos and piercings are stupid and unreliable.

The book plods along, almost but not quite capturing my interest until soon after obligatory (yet unnecessary for either plot or character development) assault that the two finally meet, and then–finally the plot begins to pick up. The two join forces and quickly uncover clues that lay hidden in plain sight since the fateful day when the industrialist’s niece disappeared. These lead them to the trail of a serial killer.

Larsson gets both the investigator and the reporter to discover the killer’s identity at about the same time, when, naturally they are miles away from each other. This leads to both being in some kind of jeopardy. But honestly, I didn’t once feel any tension, it was clear that the jeopardy would be thwarted without permanent damage of any kind being inflicted.

Things were tied up in a tidy, and somewhat satisfactory bow, and the further along in the novel, the better things moved. But there’s really little to recommend the book on. Blomkvist reads a lot of detective fiction, usually dropping the name of the author and title along the way. There are at least two mentions of a Val McDermid novel. And as many problems as I have with her stuff, it’s a darn shame that Larsson didn’t pay more attention to her, he could’ve learned how to make even an obvious conclusion not seem entirely forgone, and with enough tension and suspense to spare. The “Thriller” label that’s applied to this book is very misplaced.

Why bother to finish it? Curious to see what all the fuss was about, really. Also, the Salandar character was intriguing enough. Which is why, incidentally, I started the sequel.