Quicklet on Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Book excerpt: ABOUT THE BOOK A journalist and investigator into right-wing Nazi organizations in Sweden, Steig Larsson had a stressful and dangerous career. To help him unwind after long days at the office, he wrote the Millennium Trilogy for fun in the evenings, cathartically turning events and facts from his life and work into a story of empowerment. Before his death, he stated that all of the details of the harrowing murders and situations in his books were facts from cases he had seen throughout the course of his work. He cut and pasted these facts and cases together to create Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist's story. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first book of the Millennium Trilogy, for which worldwide sales are approaching 60 million, spent 128 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and 711 days on the Amazon top 100. Stieg Larsson was the first translated author in two decades to have a book reach number one on the New York Times Bestseller list. It has been translated into 37 languages. MEET THE AUTHOR Estelle Wagner grew up in Napa, California. She attended Sarah Lawrence College in New York where she graduated with concentrations in Latin American Political Studies and Dance. She currently lives with her husband in Buenos Aires, Argentina and enjoys traveling, dancing, and reading. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Harriet's disappearance in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo juxtaposes two eras of criminal investigation. In the first, Henrik Vanger's enormous library of files, photographs, interview statements, and police reports. In the second, Lisbeth Salander's slim laptop, the internet, and Milton Securities high-tech devices. Vanger hires Blomkvist to look at his dusty old files and photographs with fresh eyes and a new perspective, which is what Blomkvist intends to do. But he and Salander are only able to solve the crime using new technologies not available in the past, and ones that would never have occurred to Henrik Vanger or his fellow octogenarian, the police investigator. Working with the previous era's evidence is frustrating for Blomkvist. The photos show an incomplete story of the day, so he dives into the newspaper's photographic archives to examine every potentially helpful picture from the day Harriet disappeared. His best clue, the couple behind Harriet, has to be tracked down over hundreds of kilometers and days of investigation. In the end, the photo he finds is grainy and blurred, useless except for the color of the man's sweater. If Harriet had disappeared in present day times, all the stores would have had security cameras. The accident on the bridge would have been filmed by dozens of cellphone cameras. The visual evidence would have been overwhelming.