Normally I don't read thrillers (literary or otherwise), but every book people give me, I read.
And then I was hooked by the character of Lisbeth. I had to know what she would do next and so I had to read the next two books (just reading the second one isn't an option).
The complex story Larsson has spun of personal drama and international intrigue kept me reading. ( )

I read the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (AKA Män som hatar kvinnor) back in 2012, and I’ve seen both the Swedish adaptations of all three books, starring Noomi Rapace, and the Hollywood adaptation of the first by David Fincher, starring Rooney Mara; and even though it may jeopardise my standing in Sweden I actually prefer the Fincher film. But then, that’s part of the problem with this trilogy. The first book is an excellent thriller about the accidental uncovering of a serial killer. But as the two sequels dig into Lisbeth Salander’s past, so the entire thing begins hurdling one shark after another. In The Girl Who Played with Fire, Salander develops an interest in advanced mathematics, as you do, despite never finishing school. After six months of reading, she manages to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem using only the mathematics that had been available to Fermat. FFS. At the end of the book, she is shot in the head and buried alive by her estranged father. In The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, she is in hospital, recovering from brain surgery to remove the bullet, and the only ill effect seems to be she can no longer remember her proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Sigh. The idea of a secretive department in the Swedish intelligence community which went rogue is interesting, but Salander is such an over-powered and implausible protagonist the novels don’t so much teeter on the edge of suspension of disbelief as joyfully dive into the depths of WTF. It didn’t help that the translations were terrible – I don’t mean I compared the original Swedish text to the English text and found it wanting – but they’re so clumsy and ill-written the translator did an Alan Smithee on them. It wasn’t just the lumpen prose, but also details which made it plain the translator knew very little about Sweden or its society. There was, for example, a mention of Myorna which implied it was a clothing shop, when in fact it’s a chain of charity shops. There were also a number of continuity errors – Lisbeth Salander’s height varied from 4 foot 11 inches to 124 centimetres (!). The tattoo of a wasp on the side of her neck apparently was 25 cm long, which would mean she had a neck like a giraffe. The books use Fröken throughout for Miss, but the word is pretty old-fashioned and rarely used these days. Every single red wine in all three novels is described as “robust”. Most of the frobt doors in the books open inwards, when here the reverse is true. The novels also do that thing where people entering a country have their luggage searched, which has not been in common in Europe since the 1980s (Sweden joined the EU in 1995 and the Schengen Area in 2001; the books were published 2004 – 2006, but had been written over a ten-year prior to that.). I’m reliably informed the original Swedish version are much better, but if I’m not really convinced by the story I don’t think better prose is going to make me like or admire this trilogy. ( )

What a strange collection. So there are three books which I would divide into one and the second and third as one book together.

While the first was all together not that bad and interesting to read, it still was borderline stupid from time to time.

Sadly the other two books are just one cliché next to another one and I was glad once I was done.

Altogether I give it a three star rating, but it just barely reaches it. Not really highly recommended. And if, then just read the first book and don't bother with the other two. ( )

This book series completely sucked me in during college. The first book started a bit slow, but after 150 pages I was so engrossed that I started skipping classes to read more. It is a psychological thriller about a financial reporter who joins forces with an investigative reporter to solve a 40-year-old murder. The book touches heavily on themes of corruption and sexual assault, and therefore it is not an easy read, and at times is not an enjoyable read. But it feels raw and real, and it doesn't portray the heroes as beautiful princes and princesses, but merely as people who are impacted by a long history of trauma. I highly recommend it, but also issue a strong trigger warning to anyone who is interested in these books. ( )

The first book, in particular, drove me nuts with the detailed descriptions of minimalist settings, but if you can train yourself to gloss over those passages, the rest of the story is amazing. I read them a qhile back, closer to when they were first published, but I felt compelled to at least rate them now. ( )