This book holds the reader (listener) in suspense and completely enthralled in the book. One of the best books that I've read in awhile.

Solid! Keeps your interest throughout. Shocking realities. Well written.

What a wonderful read! I love the way Lisbeth's mind works. I highly recommend also the Swedish movie version of this book.

Disappointed. I thought I was reading a screenplay.

once I got used to the names, it was full speed ahead. The book's a good read; spell binding.

Larsson's novel in translation was recommended to me as a "real page turner." I should have been warned by the cliche. The book turned out to be ladened with trivial details, full of artificial dialogue and stilted language. Clearly not a page turner but a page burner.

This story is about a journalist who is convicted of libel, and then hired by a retired CEO to find out what happened to his niece, who disappeared forty years ago. So there's a mystery story about the retired CEO's niece, a financial intrigue story about the magazine article that got the journalist convicted, plus lots of other subplots, such as the journalist's struggle to keep his magazine going bankrupt, and the involvement of the titular girl. None of these subplots are really spectacular on their own, but put together they makes a pretty intricate story. What really stands out about this book is the level of detail. All of the characters, in particular, have richly detailed lives, and part of the fun of reading this book is just finding out more about the characters inhabiting it. Unfortunately, there are downsides to all this detail as well. The pacing is uneven, the writing is sometimes a bit too writerly (a technical complaint is that Larsson doesn't handle perspective very well), and there are parts of the book that would probably be quite dry in the text version. However, I listened to the audio book, and Simon Vance did such a fantastic job that even the dry parts were interesting to listen to. Another problem is that sometimes the book discusses, in detail, things that the author doesn't seem to know very much about. For example, you probably wouldn't notice anything wrong with the book's explanations of how computer hacking works if you didn't know that much about computers, but if you do, you will find it pretty silly. This is reminiscent of (but not as bad as) the effect more commonly associated with Dan Brown's novels. Overall though, I found this book rewarding, and quite different from what I originally expected.