The latest Girl ... book caught my eye, but being boringly conventional I decided to start with the first in the sequence, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, even if the cover is not quite so eye catching.
For - it is a good read, I read it inside a week, which is unheard of for me. It is engaging, thought provoking and is about somewhere sufficiently different (Sweden) to be interesting.
During most of the book nothing much happens, for the remainder the action comes thick and implausibly fast.
Against - despite the title, the girl hacker is probably in less than a quarter of the book. There is an abiding cosy middle classness things, the trains run on time, and young people are polite. Everyone rapidly becomes implausibly rich because being poor is unspeakably dull.
The bulk of the book is about the journalist author's alter ego, a brilliant journalist, who solves crimes, saves lives, wins awards, beds numerous women, and is just generally wonderful.
My geek comments would be that no top hacker would use a bog standard Apple McIntosh computer, they might use a hackintosh, they might use a Linux distro of their own devising, or Windows running on a Mac, or most likely a PC laptop. The trojan programme that plays an integral part in the later plot is just balderdash, as it presumes that you would not notice that you were working off a remote server instead of your own hard-drive. I would have thought that whenever your wifi signal dropped it would be a bit of a give away. And a trojan version of Internet Explorer!
All criticism aside, it is a well written book, it is engaging and likable and although far from perfect it well deserves its success. I'll be buying the subsequent volumes.
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