Posted by: Melinda
on Feb 8, 2010
Curse the Cassutt's! They are pushers of great books! So I blogged about The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo a few days ago. Now I can talk about The Girl Who Played with Fire, the sequel. I read it in, basically, a day. I sat up until 11:00 pm to finish it and this was the night before I had to make the drive back to N.M.
I thought this one ended a bit abruptly, but it was edge of your seat, frantic page turning all the way to the end. Not only does he create compelling mysteries, he created people I really cared about. The good people are decent but flawed and even the bad guys have reasons for what they do. They're complicated -- like real people.
He also had an amazing ability to switch POV, sometimes in the middle of a page, and not make me crazy. It's a very hard thing to pull off, and he did it. The only other writer I've seen who did it even more effortlessly was Georgette Heyer.
There were also a fairly large number of POV characters which I generally don't like. That was one minor drawback to the book, but the story was so compelling I didn't find myself becoming irritated.
The third book isn't available in the U.S. yet, but the Cassutt's scored a British edition. When I return to L.A. I hope they've finished reading so I can start the third one.
Alas there will be no more. The author died at a very young age. He was also one of the good people. He kept track of right wing, and neo-Nazi movememts in Sweden, and exposed them. I gather there were many threats and a great deal of stress, but he was determined to sound the alarm about these crazies. Wish we had a greater awareness of that toxic thread in this country because it's on the rise.
Posted by:
on Feb 4, 2010
The Cassutt's managed to blow my day in terms of accomplishing anything productive. They shoved The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson into my hands and said "read this".
It started out slowly, interesting but slow, two separate stories that slowly merge, and then BOOM, this book just grabs you and won't let go. Actually even before the journalist and the girl start working together I was totally, hopelessly hooked.
I actually read a little over 300 pages today because I couldn't put this book down. There are two "sequels", but alas the author died a few years ago so no more to follow. I'll be strolling down to Ventura Blvd. to buy book two this evening.
Since I'm a plot and structure maven I found the plotting to be convoluted but totally workable. My quibble is with the end -- it went on for a bit too long, but Larsson managed to tie together three big plots and amazingly it didn't feel forced.
