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Is there any need to introduce this bestseller? More than 12 million copies of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have been sold worldwide. Published in the UK by the MacLehose Press, the thriller was the winner of the Galaxy ‘Crime Thriller of the Year’ award in 2009 and any reader can tell you why.

Two main stories are intertwined: the troubles of Millenium magazine when one of its editors loses a libel case against the corrupt Wennerstrom industrialist and the murky history of the Vanger family.

Mikael Blomkvist, the disgraced journalist, takes a year off from his editorial role and is hired by Henrik Vanger, head of the Vanger family interests, ostensibly to write the family history. His real function is to investigate the forty-year old mystery of the disappearance of Harriet Vanger in remote Hedestad Island. Henrik is convinced that one of the dysfunctional family was the murderer, as the Island was cut off, at the time from access to the mainland.

Lisbeth Salander, the punky disturbed research aide, is the real star of the thriller. She enters into an unconventional partnership with Blomkvist and her computer-hacking skills produce spectacular revelations.

Sometimes when a novel moves from place to place and character to character, the result can be distracting, but this time it works and we follow all the thrilling threads of the story until the hunters become the hunted in an exciting climax.

Stieg Larsson’s unexpected death in 2004 meant that he never learned of the success of his novel. Fortunately for readers, he had already written the two sequels, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

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