In The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Vintage, $14.95) Stieg Larsson delivers a complex, brutal, and gripping thriller. Investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist is recruited to write the biography of a wealthy and prominent businessman—but there is an ulterior motive. Beginning with nuanced financial intrigue, the novel unfolds to reveal a long-cold murder case and chilling family secrets. To solve the mystery, Blomkvist teams up with Lisbeth Salander, a talented young computer hacker and one of the more original and appealing characters in contemporary fiction. This book’s sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, is due in July and features unsavory characters from Lisbeth’s past.
Richard Price is known for his crisp, realistic dialogue, and Lush Life (Picador, $15) would be a joy to read for the dialogue alone; fortunately, the story and characters are excellent too! Technically, Lush Life is a “police procedural,” but in fact it’s something of a mystery in reverse: you already know who did it—what you don’t know is how, or if, the police will figure it out. Price, who wrote for the TV series The Wire, is expert at portraying city life in all its quirky, gritty, imperfect, and sometimes even funny, glory. It’s amazing how his writing makes you feel like a fly on the walls of his characters’ lives. Best of all, though, reading Lush Life leaves you feeling as though you have spent time in a small corner of New York City you would never get to experience otherwise.
The Spies Of Warsaw (Random House, $15) is set in 1931 when the Nazi menace is mounting, but Hitler’s intentions are still unclear. French diplomats, German SS officers, and Russian agents angle for strategic advantage; and an engineer from a panzer factory is led down the slippery slope of betrayal. The professional spies are smooth and calculated operators, displaying dignified and noble bearing; but while patriotism is one motivation for espionage, self-interest and self-preservation prove more compelling. Alan Furst describes his characters’ most subtle dimensions and hooks the reader with their moral duplicity from the very first pages.
