Mikael Blomkvist has just been found guilty of libel - not a happy day for someone who's a journalist by profession. Not soon after, however, he's offered a temporary job by an eccentric and wealthy businessman who wants him to solve a decades old mystery: what happened to his niece, Harriet Vanger? Digging into an old Swedish family and living on their essentially private island, Mikael soon begins to tug on threads that were best left knotted and with the help of the punked out hacker Lisbeth Salander, he soon finds out that still waters run oh so deep.
Yes, I know. I'm a decade behind. I never had a single desire to read this book but I had two prompts for a book challenge I'm reading (a book published posthumously and a book with more than a million ratings on goodreads) and since this knocked both of them out, I decided to give it a try.
First thing to know: this is a graphic, graphic book. Graphic in a horrible and violent and sexual way. Where at one point I actually had to skip ahead on my audio because I just couldn't stand it - and I can stand a lot. People in this book do horrible horrible things, so anyone with any sensitivity to that should stay far away. The language is rough as well.
Putting that aside, which is hard to do, I know, I did actually find myself wrapped up in the mystery. The beginning was slow for me and the ending felt so blah blah blah once the climax was over, but all the in the middle was some great writing that really kept me wanting to know what was going to happen. Was there a single character I really liked? Not particularly, no. But the whole huge wealthy family dynamic, Lisbeth and her backstory - her character's arc, the financial-world and corruption piece, there was a lot going on here that kept me interested.
I cannot bring myself to give it more than 2.5. I'm rounding up to 3 because most of the time I really did want to keep listening. The narrator was very good, by the way. I don't know if I ever would've finished if I'd had to read it.
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