Alaska Employment Law

The late Stieg Larsson brings us a trilogy of mysteries – this is book the first – involving Mikael Blomkvist, a middle-aged journalist and publisher of Millennium, a Mother Jones-type magazine based in Stockholm, and Lisbeth Salander, a punkish, occasionally violent woman in her 20s who is a genius computer hacker when she is not being utterly antisocial. Trust me, you’ll get to like this girl. This smashingly good book opens with a mystery about pressed flowers, then abruptly turns to a court case brought against Millennium by Swedish industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström, in consequence of which Mr. Blomkvist has been found guilty of criminal libel and sentenced to 90 days in prison.

Before doing his time, Blomkvist is engaged by Henrik Vanger, the elderly, well-to-do CEO of a declining manufacturing company, to try to solve a family mystery. It seems that Henrik’s grand-niece Harriet vanished 40 years previously at age 16. Henrik, and the police, believe that she was murdered, but the case has gone bitter cold with no suspect. Under the guise of writing a Vanger family history for Henrik (warning: the Vangers are an exceedingly unpleasant family), Blomkvist sets about to discover Harriet’s fate.

Not to give away the plot, but it’s worth noting that the original title of this book in Sweden was Män Som Hatar Kvinnor, which, in case your Swedish is as good as mine is, means Men Who Hate Women. The mystery of Harriet is resolved before the book ends; the coda, in which Wennerström’s history is revealed, is a bit of an anti-climax, but it leads to emotional complexities between Blomkvist and Salander that scream for a sequel. And no doubt a sequel, book the second of the Millennium Trilogy, will be translated and published soon. The sooner the better.