Mikael Blomkvist & Lisbeth Salander
Created by Stieg Larsson

MIKAEL BLOMKVIST and LISBETH SALANDER are the mismatched detective duo who appear in a series of internationally acclaimed, posthumously published novels by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. The three books are known as the "Millennium Trilogy."

When we first meet Mikael in 2005's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he's a middle-aged financial reporter whose career has gone straight into the dumpster, thanks to a conviction for libel and a pending jail sentence.

But a powerful, elderly Swedish businessman offers him a way out -- if Mikael agrees to look into a seriously cold case involving the disappearance of a teen heiress, his brother's granddaughter, almost forty years ago. What can a potential jailbird do but jump at the chance?

With the help of Lisbeth, a troubled young investigator and hacker supreme (and the tattooed girl of the title), Mikael begins to dig into the case, and soon unearths a wriggling mass of deep dark and disturbing family secrets that wouldn't be out of place in a Ross Macdonald novel.

But that's just part of this book. At times it also reads like a something right out of the Silence of the Lambs school, and at other times it seems like we've wandered into an almost Ludlumesque paranoid world of omnipotent global and corpotrate corruption. Such a big, disjointed novel, with its wide range of characters and ever-shifting themes should be big unholy mess, with no business being as compelling and entertaining as it is.

And yet, thanks to Larsson's considerable storytelling mojo, this rambling slab of a novel has become an international sensation, almost from the moment it was first published in Swedish in 2005, and that buzz has only spread around the globe, country by country and continent by continent, as it has been translated into one foreign language after another. Somehow this unlikely thriller has become one of the most compelling and bestselling crime novels of the decade.

And the second novel in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006), only upped the ante, with Mikael and Lisbeth -- who have barely any contact with each other in it -- each plowing into the morass of Sweden's illicit sex industry and it's social welfare system from different ends. Again, it's a scenario that shouldn't work, and yet...

Part of the series' success, of course, is the backstory. The author, a graphic designer and the editor-in-chief at the Swedish antiracist magazine Expo, dropped dead of a heart attack in 2004, shortly after delivering the manuscripts for the first three books. The rumours are that part of a fourth novel and the synopses of the fifth and sixth books are also floating around.

The three completed books have already been filmed in Sweden, and the first opened in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland in early 2009 to massive acclaim and popularity, setting box office records in Norway and Denmark for a Swedish film. Needless to say, Hollywood has also been sniffing around.

NOVELS

• Män som hatar kvinnor (2005; aka "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo") ...Buy this book ...Kindle it!
• Flickan som lekte med elden (2006; aka "The Girl Who Played with Fire") ...Buy this book ...Kindle it!
• Luftslottet som sprängdes (2007; aka "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest")

FILM

• MÄN SOM HATAR KVINNOR (2009, Yellow Bird/Nordisk Film and TV)
  ...Buy this DVDBased on the novel by Stieg Larsson
  Screenplay by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg
  Directed by Niels Arden Oplev
  152 minutes
  Starring Michael Nyqvist as MIKAEL BLOMKVIST
  and Noomi Rapace as LISBETH SALANDER
  Also starring Sven-Bertil Taube, Peter Haber, Marika Lagercrantz, Lena Endre, Bjôrn Granath, Ingvar Hirdwall, Peter Andersson, Michalis Koutsogiannakis and Ewa Frôling
  
  
• FLICKAN SOM LEKTE ELDEN (2009, Yellow Bird/Nordisk Film and TV)
  Based on the novel by Stieg Larsson
  Directed by Niels Arden Oplev
  
  
• LUFTSLOTTET SOM SPRÄNGDES (2009, Yellow Bird/Nordisk Film and TV)
  Based on the novel by Stieg Larsson
  Directed by Niels Arden Oplev

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith, with a little guidance from Mark Sullivan.