Reviews with content warning for Rape - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I have very mixed feelings about this book - on the one hand, the mystery developed is very engaging. The story takes a while to get started, but once pieces are uncovered, the pace picks up rapidly towards the end and I found myself very curious to know "whodunit". On the other hand, the author was very obviously a man. Women were described in unnecessary detail, everyone seemed to fall in love with main male lead, despite sometimes problematic age gaps/professional interactions with the women involved, and he was a notorious flirt and never stayed with anyone he hooked up with except his long term open relationship with a married woman. There was gratuitous sexual violence especially, as we find out later, surrounding the murder investigation. Irritatingly, I was curious enough about the mystery to continue reading and would probably read the rest of the series in hopes of more mystery and less everything else but the plot could have been driven more by other factors.

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kxl_knight's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

4.5

Well written, terrifying moments with small senses of hope and humor.

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kissezmusic's review against another edition

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mysterious tense medium-paced

3.0

i would like to start this by saying i am not normally a fan of mystery books. i like a good mysterious book but mystery as a genre never really interested me and that held true here as well. it was by no means a bad book, hence the 3 stars, just not for me. i did end up spoiling it for myself by accidentally seeing something on a wayyy later page, i saw one of his emails to her, which really took the little enjoyment i had by that point (probably around page 140 at that moment) out of it completely.

there are 2 slightly on page non-consent scenes and one almost non-consent scene, which i did not know about, i knew nothing about this book going into it; please be careful with that. also this book has a very liberal use of the r slur derogatorily (one character slightly uses it to 'jusify' an action), so please keep that in mind.

i didn't very much enjoy the pages and time in the book after the central mystery is done, it was very boring to me just reading about office politics and such.

this is all just my personal opinion so please take it with a grain of salt. if you want to read this, please do! the translation feels very smooth and had i not been told there was a translator, i would've thought this was written in english originally.

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