Book: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

It's clear from the start of this book, even after reading the title in fact, that it's more about the characters and experiences they go through rather than any thrilling crime promised by the genre it falls into. That's not to say that the story isn't thrilling; it is, and I genuinely wanted to know who was behind everything and how they would be brought to justice and all that jazz.

But as adequate as the story can be, it won't in itself bring characters to life. And although TGWTDT does a fair job of breathing life into its main protagonists, it falls quite a way short of making them as believable as those you personally know in real life. It could be the context, but I suspect that it was more to do with the deliberate, and so cheap, ways in which the author attempts to trick his readers into falling for his characters. Flaws aren't indicative if they're handed to you on a platter, and impossible knowledge and cheating don't help a protagonist appear any more real than them being able to fly would.

Technically the book is well enough written, with various arcs being explored and tied up in a fair manner. I will say that there's a lot of time pass and guff that could have been discarded, but that's a minor fault really.

Overall I feel that the book fails in what it sets out to achieve, but despite that manages to entertain well enough. I will be reading the next two books anyway, so from me I guess that more or less counts as some kind of recommendation.