I had been hearing a lot about the Millennium series of books written by Stieg Larsson, what with the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo film coming out at the cinema. I like a good mystery/thriller kind of story and there seemed to be something about this story that I thought I would like. When I got my new Kindle for Christmas I decided to buy myself the three books as my first set of Ebooks.


The girl with the dragon tattoo is the first of the series of books by the author. The story is set in Sweden which is a country that I didn't know anything about except a couple of main town names and the fact that its cold up there. The first thing I noticed when I was reading the book were the place names. They were strange to me and I didn't know how to pronounce them, this made it hard to get my head round some of it as I like to know what I am reading but as I got into the story I found that I could just skim over the town words that I didn't know and it didn't affect the way the story read.


The main characters in the story are Mikail Blomkvist, Lisbeth Salander, and Henrik Vanger. Mikail is a financial journalist and publisher of a magazine called Milennium. At the beginning of the story you find that he has just lost a court case and he has been found guilty of libel against a wealthy business man called Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. This puts the magazine in jeopardy so he decides to distance himself from it for a while. He is asked by another business mad Henrik Vanger to come to Hedeby Island and write a family history book about the industrialist's family and at the same time to look into the disappearance of Henrik's niece Harriet who disappeared off the island 36 years previously and had never been heard of again.


Lisbeth Salander is a young woman who has serious mental issues due to being abused in her childhood. She is a brilliant computer hacker and also has a photographic memory. This stands her in good stead to work for a man called Armansky who runs a security firm and is often asked to do reports on people in a discreet way. Lisbeth is his top reporter although he doesn't know how she manages to find out all the details she does and do such good reports.


Before Vanger employs Mikail Blomkvist he employs Armansky to do a report on him and Lisbeth is the one who does the digging on the journalist. Then later when Blomkvist is starting to delve into the disappearance of the girl and needs a research assistant he decides to ask Lisbeth to help him and a very strange relationship comes together.


I found the story absolutely fascinating. It was gritty and had so many twists and turns to keep you wondering what had happened. I really liked the relationship between Mikael and Lisbeth. You also had the relationship between Mikael and his business partner Erika Berger which through a lot of spanners into the works. I found some of the bits at the beginning a bit hard to follow where the writer was just laying out the court tale and getting you into the story but once I was in it was hard to put the Kindle down. The characters were well written and I found I could imagine them in my head quite easily as to how they looked and the way they did things. The mystery was well drawn out and there were some really exciting bits to the book which were quite dark and scary.


Now I have finished reading the first book I have already started on the second one in the series and looking forward to seeing how the characters carry on with their relationships over the three books.