The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Oh. My. Gosh. This book was initially so slow...I almost quit after the first chapter because I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on! And then I read the second chapter and absolutely loved the character of Lisbeth. The book is a little rough going (speaking as an American) because the author is Swedish and it's set in Sweden, so is full of Swedish names and places. Characters are not referred to by the same name through the whole book--one character even had three different names! That slowed me down a little bit, but the book definitely sucked me in. It's very carefully crafted.

It's about Mikael, a journalist who works for Millennium magazine (thus why it's called the Millennium trilogy), and his story on Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. It ends up that all of the information he had gotten for the story was fake and he ends up being framed and sentenced to a three month term in jail. In the meantime, Henrik Varner has Lisbeth Salander research Mikael because he is wanting the forty year old mystery of Harriet Varner's (his niece) death solved. He ends up hiring Mikael and he stumbles into old family secrets while trying to discover Harriet's murderer. Eventually, he and Lisbeth team up together and solve it, and it is an incredible read.

Right now I am waiting for The Girl Who Played with Fire to be returned at the library so I can continue the series!