The Millennium aka The Girl series

After reading The Millennium series last week, I now know exactly five things that have come from Sweden--my sister-in-law's late husband Ulf (who I've never met), the furniture maker Ikea, the pop group Abba, the vampire movie 'Let the Right One In,' and this crime trilogy by Stieg Larsson.

The books made a killing in the 2010 bestsellers list, which means there's something in them that caught the public's interest. After reading them, I think I know what it is. It's almost formulaic actually--the right mix of suspense, sex and action.

'The Girl...,' which is how the titles of all three books in the series start, is Lisbeth Salander. She's every inch a heroine, and by that I mean she's not someone you'd meet in real life. A few inches short of 5 feet, she looks like an anorexic teen. But she could beat the crap of an armed biker dude three times her size. And she's also a world-class hacker with a photographic memory.

Of course, somebody THAT gifted has to be antisocial, and so she is. Her antisocial personality disorder (I'm making an amateur diagnosis here; the series hints at Asperger's but up to the end it doesn't give a name to Lisbeth's condition), in fact, is used as a launching pad for a number of plot twists.

The other protagonist, who serves to foil The Girl's unconventionality, is Mikael Blomkvist, an idealistic veteran journalist, whose career exploits are given just as much attention as his habit of bedding almost all the female characters who befriended him in the series.

Together Lisbeth and Mikael, with the aide of a few supporting characters who recur throughout the trilogy, solved a missing person mystery, dismantled a sex trafficking operation, and exposed a secret organization within the Swiss Sapo.

While I'm not a fan of characters with inexplicable talents, unless they figured in a fantasy plot, I enjoyed the series overall. I had to sustain suspension of disbelief for an extended period, what with the number of coincidences that influenced how the plot unfolded. But overall I think Mikael and the other characters were able to counter the implausibility of some aspects of the plot. For entertainment value, I give it 3 out of 5 stars.