Swedish Sleuths

Iready a blazing literary sensation internationally, Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson's dark-hearted thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Knopf) is now poised to burn up bestseller lists in America.

The spark of Larsson's debut novel—the first in a trilogy he completed before his untimely death, in 2004—is the 40-year-old mystery of a teenage girl's disappearance from her sinisterly wealthy family's private island. The fire comes from an unlikely pairing of amateur sleuths: middle-aged, crime-novel aficionado Mikael Blomkvist, a recently disgraced financial investigafive reporter found guilty of libeling an influential Swedish family, and Lisbeth Salander, a tattooed, antisocial, ferociously brilliant 24-yearold, with a photographic memory and a disturbing history of victimization, making her the perfect foil for the crusading, socially conscious Blomkvist. To the new breed of Watson and Holmes, skoal!

E.S.