Alaska Employment Law

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (translated from Swedish) is a bit of a phenomenon, given that he died of a heart attack, age 50, before any of it was published.  Last fall I encouraged you to run right out and buy the first volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Wicked good!  Feeling impatient for more, I checked a month ago and found that the second volume, The Girl Who Played with Fire, was still not available in the US, so I gave up waiting and bought it on Amazon’s UK site.  Ah, that’s better!  Now I can hardly wait for the third volume, tentatively called The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest — which still has to be translated, of course.  (Meanwhile, the first volume has been adapted into a very successful film in Sweden.)

The immense appeal of these books (not to everyone, mind you:  high brow critics, including the one in the New York Times, were not that excited about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is a little hard to explain.  In general they concern a middle-aged investigative journalist and publisher, Mikael Blomkvist, who runs a fictional muck-raking magazine called Millennium.  The theme of both books, in the end, is that the world has more than its fair share of misogynistic exploiters of women.  Book the First has some truly evil people in it; and The Girl Who Played with Fire centers on the brutal murders of two writers who were about to publish an extensive exposé of sex trafficking involving underage girls and young women in Sweden, naming names.  Into the middle of these tales comes our exceptionally odd, exceptionally appealing heroine, Lisbeth Salander, a young, tattooed computer-hacker extraordinaire with violent tendencies and a hatred of those men who do in fact exploit women.  Lonely, brilliant, iconoclastic, blessed with her own unswerving moral code, psychologically complex, completely original, but mostly just wanting to be left alone, Lisbeth is what keeps the pages turning at high speed in these terrific books.

So, when it gets to America, add The Girl Who Played with Fire to your reading list — right after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.