Summary The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is aided in his search for a woman who has been missing for forty years by Lisbeth Salander, a young computer hacker.
Mikael Blomkvist is a disgraced journalist who is asked by a wealthy industrialist to write a biography on his family. But what he really wants Blomkvist to do is to find out what happened to his niece, who went missing 40 years ago. Blomkvist, at first, is not interested, till the man offers to help him clear his name. Blomkvist, begins by talking to the man's relatives who were there when the girl went missing. And some of them are not forth coming. Blomkvist eventually believes that her disappearance might have something to do with some serial killings that took place 20 years before she disappeared. So he asks for a research assistant. So the industrialist's man suggests Lisbeth Salander, a talented hacker who does background checks for them and who even did one on Blomkvist. When he sees her report, he's impressed and asks her to work with him and she does. She's anti-social but is extremely efficient.
After being successfully sued for libel by a wealthy industrialist, investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist leaves his magazine Millennium and accepts an offer from Henrik Vanger to write the Vanger family history. An old industrial family, the Vangers have their share of skeletons in their closet. What Henrik is most interested in learning however is what happened to his niece, Harriet Vanger, who he is certain was murdered by a member of his family in the summer of 1966. Mikael takes on the task and moves into a small cottage on the Vanger estate. He begins to decipher some of the clues Harriet has left behind and decides to get an assistant, computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, the woman who did the very thorough background check on him for Vanger. Together, they learn of some of the Vangers deep, violent secrets.
Stockholm-based Mikael Blomkvist, co-owner and co-editor of Millennium magazine, has just lost a high profile libel case resulting from an article he wrote on businessman Hans-Erik Wennerström. This loss has the potential to ruin Mikael professionally. As such, he leaves the magazine in the hands of the other co-owner/co-editor, Erika Berger, with who he is openly having an affair, which ruined his marriage. Even in Erika's hands, the magazine is also suffering because of the scandal and resulting loss of ad revenue. Because of Mikael's investigative abilities as a journalist, he receives an offer by wealthy and aged Henrik Vanger: solve the forty year old cold case of his missing and presumed dead grandniece, Harriet Vanger, who was only sixteen at the time of her disappearance. Despite Henrik's generous financial compensation, which could also save the magazine, Mikael is unconvinced to do the work until Henrik adds one additional piece of compensation that money can't buy. Mikael will largely do the work on Hedeby Island just off of Hedestad in northern Sweden, the island where Harriet was last seen, and where most of the dysfunctional extended Vanger family still lives, they who are among the suspects. To the family, Mikael is solely writing a chronicle of the Vanger family, without them knowing that his primary task is to find Harriet's killer. As Mikael proceeds with his investigation, he asks for a research assistant. Who Henrik's lawyer recommends is a young woman named Lisbeth Salanger, who conducted the background check on Mikael which Henrik ordered in preparation to hire him for this job. Mikael agrees with the choice when he sees that check she did of him, he knowing that she could only have found out key pieces of information through one means, which could help in this matter. Lisbeth is a brilliant investigator, but troubled in her personal life, which includes being under state guardianship due to incidents that happened while she was growing up. Despite what he knows of Lisbeth through her research of him, and despite her alternative appearance, Mikael begins to trust her, and she him - the first person she trusts in establishment in a long time - as they tie Harriet's disappearance to a series of what look to be murders of young women leading up to the disappearance. Through the case, Lisbeth begins to see a different life for herself, while Mikael has the larger goal of regaining his good name by knowing that Wennerström is much what he wrote.
Found guilty on sixteen counts of aggravated libel, the disgraced, Stockholm-based journalist of the radical Millennium magazine, Mikael Blomkvist, decides to step aside. Having all the time in the world, ruined Mikael reluctantly agrees to work for the millionaire industrialist, Henrik Vanger, who, for the past four long decades, has been trying to shed light on the mysterious disappearance of his beloved, sixteen-year-old niece, Harriet. But, as Mikael digs deep into the opaque past of the dysfunctional Vangers, under the guise of writing a memoir, he stumbles across emotionally detached Lisbeth Salander: the very same computer hacker who intruded into his personal life on Henrik's behalf. Now, against the backdrop of unaccountable disappearances, shocking family secrets, and a string of nauseating first-degree murders, the unlikely team must work in unison to unearth the truth. What has happened to poor Harriet?
