The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Plots: Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is aided by eccentric hacker Lisbeth Salander in his search for a woman who has been missing for 40 years. Mikael Blomkvist is a disgraced journalist who is asked by a wealthy industrialist to write a biography on his family. But what he really wants Blomkvist to do is to find out what happened to his niece, who went missing 40 years ago. At first Blomkvist isn’t interested, until the man offers to help him clear his name. Blomkvist begins by talking to the man’s relatives who were there when the girl went missing, but some of them are not forthcoming. Blomkvist eventually believes that her disappearance might have something to do with some serial killings that took place 20 years before she disappeared, so he asks for a research assistant. The industrialist’s man suggests Lisbeth Salander, a talented hacker who does background checks for them and who even did one on Blomkvist. When he sees her report, he’s impressed and asks her to work with him and she does. She’s anti-social but is extremely efficient. After being successfully sued for libel by a wealthy industrialist, investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist leaves his magazine Millennium and accepts an offer from Henrik Vanger to write the Vanger family history. An old industrial family, the Vangers have their share of skeletons in their closet. What Henrik is most interested in learning however is what happened to his niece, Harriet Vanger, who he is certain was murdered by a member of his family in the summer of 1966. Mikael takes on the task and moves into a small cottage on the Vanger estate. He begins to decipher some of the clues Harriet has left behind and decides to get an assistant, computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, the woman who did the very thorough background check on him for Vanger. Together, they learn of some of the Vangers’ deep, violent secrets.