The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Played with Fire and then Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

I'm going to talk about how great the story was or about the character developement or any of that normal review stuff. What struck me about these books was the way the story was told. In the first book, you have a fairly benign story about a journalist who is hired to solve a 40 year old mystery. The title character in the books is pretty much a secondary character. Very little is told about her. It describes how she is in a strange position, being an adult but still under state supervision, and she is a very unusual person. She becomes the assistant of the journalist and together they solve the mystery. So, you would expect at this point, that this is a character that will have a series of stories like this. Sort of a Sam Spade type. Every book a new case. In all this, because of the way the first book ends, you get the impression that the journalist character might not even be in the other books. The last two books are actually a single story and it is all about this girl. Her past, and how that past has come full force back into her life and what she does to deal with it. There are three murders and the evidence points to the girl. Two of the vicims are writers working with the journalist from the first book. So he is involved, and the whole thing becomes him trying to find the truth as the events unfold. The story is spread out into the two final books f the trilogy. The reason I am so entranced by these books is theway the second one was written. It starts with the girl, and she hs a couple of events happen, none of which is too extreme except for the hurricane and the dead tourist, but she returns home and does a few things to organize her life situation. Then, the reader reads that she goes and meets with the victims. the next thing that happens is the two are dead and it looks like the girl was responsible. The weirdness is that for the next half a book, you don't hear a thing from or about the girl as the journalist begins to figure things out. Eventually, there are a couple of cryptic mesages to the journalist from the girl and it is far into the book before the writer starts telling her story and what she has been doing and what she does next, all the time the journalist is doing what he can. At the end of the book, the journalist finds the girl near death. The second unusual structure in the book is that, except for a couple of written messages between the two, a chance meeting where they see each other before the girl runs off while the journalist gets pounded, and the meeting literally in the last two pages, the two main characters have absolutly no interaction. Continuing the unusual nature of the story, in the third book, the girl spends most of it in some sort of custody or hospital, and though the two communicate, this main character spends most of the book in bed. All gets settled and the girl gets free in time to have an important encounter or two and then, at the end of the book, finally meets up with the journalist. that's it. three books with two main characters who establish a relationship in the first book, and then rarely interact for two more books. And the title character is absent for most of the second book, and in a hospital bed or jail for most of the third. I just thought this was a really unique way to tell a story.