When she reaches adolescence, an elderly lawyer named Palmgren enters the picture, and manages to have her transferred to a foster family. In the ensuing few years, she runs away from at least four different foster homes, but when she is 18, Palmgren – the only one to sense her intelligence and desperation — arranges for her to be released into a guardianship, allowing her to operate independently as long as her guardian (a truly evil man, alas) continues to send good monthly reports to his superior. In retaliation for his rape of her, Salander swiftly figures out how to control him, so that his reports are uniformly good, despite the fact that they are lies.
Salander is, in fact, brilliant, a whiz-kid computer savant who uses her talents to hack into any system she wants. She plays with esoteric math problems in her spare time. She has learned how to keep silent when questioned by anyone in authority, and is indeed a flagrant iconoclast.
But to back up: Michael Blomkvist, a writer for a liberal magazine called Millennium, finds himself in court to answer a libel charge brought by a wealthy industrialist named Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. Blomkvist had published an article on Wennerstrom’s wrong-doings, using information fed to him by a friend. It was, in fact, a set-up engineered by Wennerstrom via the friend, and as a result, Blomkvist finds himself facing a 90-day jail sentence.
In the time before the sentence becomes active, he is approached by a lawyer representing a retired industrialist named Henrik Vanger. Vanger wants to employ Blomkvist’s investigative energies to find out what had happened, many years before, to his niece, Harriet Vanger, who simply disappeared one day.
Blomkvist is not eager to involve himself in the matter, but of course (how else would the story happen?) he becomes intrigued. For starters, he asks Armansky and Milton Security to assign his star researcher, Lisbeth Salander, to do the research. Thereby hangs the first tale, and an intricate and interesting one it is.
The second and third books give us more explanation Blomkvist’s adventures, as well as further information about Lisbeth Salander’s background, along with plenty of sturm-und-drang excitement. Larsson’s tale is so engrossing that this reviewer devoured all three books with few breaks, in about as many days.
While Lisbeth is the titular character, the books are every bit as much about Blomkvist as about her. He is a man of strong principles (except where women are concerned; there, he is an unrepentant ladies’ man). He is also a fine reporter.
One of the more interesting tangential characters is Erika Berger, the editor of Millennium. She, too, is principled and hard-working, but with an odd twist: she is married to an artist whom she loves, but she also sleeps with Blomkvist on an old-friends-with-benefits basis, a situation her husband understands and accepts. When offered the editorship of a major Swedish magazine, she accepts, but then finds entirely too many back-stabbing office politics as well as an unprincipled publisher. She quits, returning to her beloved, independent Millennium with great joy.
In describing these books as not your usual block-buster thrillers, I do not mean to imply that they aren’t full of danger and mayhem. There are enough of both to satisfy any eager reader. They are, however, thrillers of more than average depth, exploring as they do the things that make or do not make a moral human being. Lisbeth Salanger, damaged and difficult as she is, is a vibrantly honest and deeply moral human being. So, for that matter, is Michael Blomkvist, despite his amoral sexuality. Nor are all the societal units (police; government; secret service; social service departments) wholly good or wholly evil. There are good guys and bad guys in every sphere, in every country, as Larsson carefully makes clear, and their effects on one another provide the basis for all truly great stories … of which this is quite definitely one (or three).
©2011 Julia Sneden for SeniorWomen.com
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