I've read the first two in French and on paper.
The girl with the Dragon Tattoo has three interweaved stories written in. Two of them are about brutal misogyny and are set in a detective/journalist/mystery type plot. The author seems to have chosen the subject to denounce the treatments given women and delinquent youths in Sweden's past. Some descriptive can be shocking but the power of the stories are enough to keep you reading. Frankly I was not expecting something so shocking and at points had to refrain myself from skipping pages.
I read the first two tomes in a binge weekend each.
The second tome uses the first charactes and adds some to again denounce bad treatment of women revolving around eastern prostitue murders. Then again the story is powerful but does not, as the first one, end there, it is continued in the third book. I haven't read it yet. YGG tells me it is the best of the three.
The translation was not fluid but the story made up for it. And it is easy to read because subchapters are separated and last from two to thirty pages long.
Can't wait to read the last one!
