Though I only read about 2/3 of this amazing book in total (I read bits throughout, including the end, though), given the approximate spread-out of 3 hours I had to read this 700+ page-long book, it still managed to leave a lasting impression on me.

Lisbeth Salander is a girl whom the state has declared incompetent, and who is being raped by her legal guardian. She’s also a world-class computer hacker, who has blackmailed that man into doing whatever she wished him to. With stolen billions in her pockets after a fraud scandal, Salander is virtually undefeatable. But as with all stories, there’s a twist behind the twist. Dark secrets from her past that drove her into an institution when she was 12 is shielded by red letters saying that it’s national security that no one should ever know.

It’s a wonderfully written book that kept sucking me in even though I never really planned on finishing it. Each character is perfectly crafted to fulfill their purpose. Some of them may chill you to the bones, while in others, you’ll find a character that really cares for Salander. There are more explicit themes in this book, but it doesn’t delve much into that (well, in the parts that I read, anyway), even though it starts out seeming like a big part of the plot. I guess that would have been a flaw here. A few journalists are set on uncovering the “importing of girls” into their country, and it goes into elaborate detail about their plans, then it cuts off right away when they are murdered. The point of their long conversations and meetings seem both misleading and pointless to me. The only reason I detected for all this was for a theory for their murders that was about a paragraph long. Surely, Larsson could have afforded to cut all this shorter.

For me, I could feel the surroundings, and though I was reading this under a palm tree, I could feel sense the dreary and wet atmosphere that all of this took place in. This is one book that I’ll look forward to indulging in if I get my hands on it again for a longer period of time.