I wander out of genre regularly to keep my head up and learn other tricks and tropes.  Writers rather need to do that, in my opinion, and I’m lucky enough to have a group of writers who explore multiple genres with me.  While I will actually read a text version to do my analysis, I listened to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on a long drive back and for the to Bend Oregon.  It’s a long audio, and it wasn’t over after the drive.  So I walked, and gardened, and cleaned, and walked some more. I got irritated when anyone interrupted my story.

This was, perhaps, the most satisfying crime novel I’ve read.  It peeled out like an onion, one delicious layer at a time, revealing depths of character, new clues, new twists, and none of them read like missteps.  I am a character reader – I love reading about interesting people.  Larsson’s people are fabulous – multi-layered and most of them not simply good or simply bad, but rather interesting and complex like real people are.

I am, by the way, very unhappy that the author is dead.  I want more than the other two books that I know are there.