I’ve recently just read a book by Steig Larsson, the first of what has been called the ‘Millenium Trilogy’, below is a synopsis of the story.

A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.

It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.

It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age—and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it—who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism—and an unexpected connection between themselves.

It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives.

It’s really an excellent book which starts off a little deep but soon becomes, for lack of a better word, unputdownable, and features some of the best realisation of characters I’ve read in a long, long time. The story is rich, deep (incredibly so) and multi-tiered, and the book just keeps on going through a 500 page web of intrigue, the end result of which was to purchase the second book of the trilogy the second the book was closed. Highly recommended.

Sorry for the short review, I’ll try to expand on it later, it was put up quickly for someone.