With mysteries, especially, I think it's important not to spoil the ending for those who haven't yet read the book.
For myself, I find preserving the suspense of storytelling important, whether it's a book, TV, or movies. I can't tell you how delighted I was to discover the happy ending of Orfeo ed Euridice. Oops! Gave away the ending!
I enjoyed both of these novels but despite the huge popularity of Stieg Larsson's The Girl series, I actually liked Faceless Killers more.
Both novels are by Swedes, set in Sweden, and both of them display an intense anxiety about the seamy underside of modern life that reminds me of the Len Deighton and Alistair MacLean novels about the espionage during the Cold War that I read as a child.
In this, they're really very similar to the police procedurals on TV that deal with corruption and terrible crimes. That perhaps explains part of their popularity.
One of the things I really admired about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was that Larsson, whose work as a journalist seemed to focus on business reporting, especially exposes of criminal corporate behavior, uses that knowledge in his novel but also introduces many other classic elements of popular novels. I'm sure that this, too, is part of its popularity.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a murder mystery, a business thriller, a family saga, and, most interestingly, a critique of violence against women. It has surprised me that this aspect of the novel, the presentation of violence against women, is so little discussed.
As befits a long novel, the exposition begins slowly and indirectly.
With great sadness, an elderly man opens a package. It contains a rare flower, pressed and framed. He regards the collection of similar flowers he’s received every year on his birthday, for forty years. Who is sending these mysterious gifts and why are they sending them? He calls another retired man, a former detective, as he always does when he receives these somber packages.
Mikael Blomkvist is a disgraced investigative journalist, convicted in court of libel. He's lost his reputation and is going to jail. The fate of his once-prestigious business magazine is now uncertain. The man who brought Blomkvist to court is a businessman named Wennerstrom.
And Wennerstrom is being investigated by Armansky. Armansky is an interesting man with an unusual background and an unusual helper, the tattooed hacker Lisbeth Salander.
What connects these people? An aged, retired Swedish industrialist who is haunted by the loss of a beloved niece. It turns out that he thinks that there's something fishy about the Wennerstrom case, and he decides to take advantage of Blomkvist's unemployment to entice him to look into the disappearance of his niece, so many years before.
And that's just the very beginning of this intricate and varied novel. There are other people to meet, and many other stories to tell.
Lisabeth Salander is a fascinating character. I don't know how to describe her. She's a little wild although really very reclusive, very tough and well -- almost fearless. This first novel in the series has so much in it, so many characters and so many pieces of a large, intricate plot that Salander isn't as central here as she is in the other two books of the trilogy.
Blomkvist is fairly unconventional, too, but less so. I'd say that although he's quiet about it, Blomkvist is a lover of women and so perhaps it's fitting that his character is here not only as a detective but as a witness.
The strength of Faceless Killers, in my eyes, is its sharper focus. It's a more character-driven novel. Wallander is a senior police detective in a obscure, mid-size Swedish town. He's divorced and still misses his ex-wife. He's estranged from his daughter. He sees his father but not nearly as much as he should: his father is quite angry that Wallander can't find more time for him. He misses the people in his life, his people, but he doesn't seem to really see them.
He would never say this himself but he is married to his work. It fills his waking thoughts. He's a good man nearly crushed by loneliness and love of his work which, while fascinating, is hardly emotionally sustaining. This aspect of the novel is, I think, realistic. It's hard to be a cop -- it can be draining or worse.
This novel is filled with anxiety as well. Here, the anxiety is less about the crimes of the past than it is about profound social change. The plot turns on the murder of an elderly couple on their farm in the middle of the night. Their neighbors realize something is wrong because they hear the couple's horse neighing. The isolation of this couple intensifies the horror of the case.
A media feeding frenzy erupts when someone leaks to the press that the dying woman's last word sounded like, "foreigners," igniting a murderous backlash of anti-immigrant feeling and revealing the existence of Swedish fascists.
Wallander is a complicated character, a man who has the best of intentions but can't sustain relationships. Wallander is someone whose sometimes inappropriate behavior is quietly tolerated by those around them, I think as a mark of respect. His subordinates say nothing but drive him home when they find him driving up to a checkpoint with liquor on his breath. He makes a clumsy pass at a local prosecutor who eventually dates him. Its this complexity that makes him such an appealing character to me.
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