Millennium Trilogy Captivates Readers Posted on October 31st, 2009 by Barbara Fister

Marlys Johnson shares a reading suggestion: Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy” – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland. She reports:

I am knee deep in reading Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.  If you are not familiar with Larsson, he’s a Swede (now deceased – 2004, I think) who delivered the manuscripts of three books to a publisher just before he died of a heart attack.  He was founder of the magazine, Expo, in Sweden, an advocate of social justice, and very aware of crimes against women.  He and his common-law wife of 30 years were the target of many attacks over the years because of his vocal support of social issues.

The books:  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and the Girl and Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, have an unusual heroine – a 90 pound, tattooed, social outcast, who is the “world’s best computer hacker” with her own set of moral standards.  She is abetted in crime solving by the editor of Millennium, a magazine focused on ferreting out the truth about financial and social intrigue.  The writing is journalistic in nature, rather than literary, and the various plots and subplots keep the reader up at night.

Marlys Johnson isn’t the only one to find herself absorbed in this unusual series. They have sold 20 million copies in 40 countries. Though the third book in the trilogy has not yet been published in the U.S., it has in England – and thanks to the library’s Scandinavian Studies endowment, we were able to get a copy hot off the press.  We doubt it will spend much time on the shelf. Scandinavian mysteries translated into English are among our most popular interlibrary-loan requests.