Recent crime novels | 23 February 2008

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (MacLehose Press, £14.99, translated from the Swedish by Stephen Murray) is the first volume of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Larsson was a journalist who sadly died of a heart attack before publication. But the books are selling in their millions across Europe and, once you read the first of them, it’s not hard to see why. The central character, Blomkvist, works for a hard-hitting magazine named Millennium. An attack on a corrupt Swedish billionaire has backfired, leaving him on the brink of financial and professional ruin. He accepts a lifeline in the form of a commission to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl nearly 40 years earlier in an island variant of the classic locked-room mystery. But the two cases are linked, and there are also connections to Sweden’s wartime fascists.

This is a long thriller but it sustains the reader’s interest, partly because it’s well-plotted but more, perhaps, because of the anger Larsson directs at his targets.