Picked this up while on a small spree a few months ago, largely to see what all the fuss was about. Crime isn't my usual genre, but Larsson's books seem far more 'general fiction that happens to be about crime' than crime novels in themselves, which is perhaps some of the basis for their broad appeal. The back copy makes the book sound positively pedestrian, sprinkling adjectives like candy around the character descriptions of CEO, journalist and security specialist.  Lisbeth Salander - our girl with the dragon tattoo - is an extremely socially awkward but highly intelligent hacker and investigator assisting Mikael Blomkvist, super-moral but convicted-of-libel financial journalist, in investigating a supposed murder for Henrik Vanger - friendly but manipulative head of a giant (and failing) corporation. There's a fair whack about business and secret accounts in the Cayman Islands, more family members that you can possibly keep track of, and the odd gruesomely violent scene.  With a book this popular, I feel I have to either love it or hate it. But I'm rather ambivalent. It's not a bad book - Larsson certainly puts enough twists in the story that the reveal of The Big Bad People is a surprise, and the plot itself is fairly strong. But it suffers from the translation - the voice of the novel is clunky and uneven, and the pace is far too slow.

It takes some hundred pages before the story even starts, and even then you're not sure it has. While the book sustains interest - I was curious to know how it all fitted together - and maintains the reader's trust that it will somehow all fit together (it does), there was no tension involved in the overall story - only in specific scenes where immediate violence was threatened. The plot is solid, but long-winded, with a lot of text devoted to not-much-happening.

Larsson writes confronting scenes extremely well - something quite difficult to do, especially given the subject matter. It's apparent both from the nature of the violence and the statistics he presents as chapter bylines that violence against women is a bugbear of his, and a major theme behind the book, not just throughout it. There's enough violence that I'd hesitate recommending this to my more sensitive friends, but not so much that the book turns into horror-porn or farce.

The characterisation would probably be the weakest area, in my opinion, especially of Salander - while he handles the mystery of her past with great finesse (I'm relieved we're never outright told what happened to her, but given enough clues to figure it out) we're never quite sure if we know her - problematic when she's the character tying the series together. There's also a problem where, toward the very end of the book, she acts far, far out of character, demonstrating skills, knowledge and abilities that had never been hinted at in the book (and toward an end that wasn't strictly necessary). It seems like an effort to make her "cooler", show that she can do anything, but in the reality of her situation, just serves to reinforce the fact that she's a fiction.

In all, it was a reasonably entertaining read, but not enough to interest me in the future books. The plotting is good, but the characters are not inviting enough, the translated-text lacks strength in voice or tension, and the overall arc of the book was not particularly satisfying.