Stieg Larsson Collection: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, the Girl Who Played with Fire (Millennium Trilogy)

The 'Millennium Trilogy' is a series of novels written originally in Swedish by Author Stieg Larsson. These books are crime thrillers and deal mainly with sexual crimes against women.

The main recurring characters of the series are Lisbeth Salander, a troubled young woman with photographic memory, and an investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who is the publisher and editor of a magazine called Millennium.

The box set includes the following 3 titles :

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Mikael Blomkvist is facing financial ruin after he loses a libel case. At this time, Blomkvist is offered an investigative job by a businessman Henrik Vanger, the popular CEO of the Vanger Corporation. Vanger has had Blomkvist's background investigated and now believes that he is the man to help him solve a mystery that surrounds a personal tragedy that happened many years back.

Blomkvist starts the investigation and runs deeper and deeper into a series of murders that took place forty years ago. He desperately needs an assistant and finds one in Lisbeth Salander, an asocial but gifted young woman who is a computer specialist. Together, Blomkvist and Salander uncover dark and terrible family secrets that have been buried for far too long.

The Girl Who Played with Fire

Mikael Blomkvist is planning the publication of an expose concerning sex trafficking between Sweden and Eastern Europe, with a report that would implicate many high-profile businessmen and politicians. Just before the report is published, two of his investigative journalists who worked on the story are murdered. Lisbeth Salander, the young woman who helped him in his previous investigation, is implicated.

Blomkvist, the only person who believes absolutely in her innocence, sets out to find some answers. Meanwhile, Lisbeth Salander is the target of a murderous plot. She finds herself drawn into a situation that forces her to confront her dark and troubled past.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

Lisbeth Salander, in intensive care after a bullet wound to the head, is slowly recovering. She's now facing three murder charges and one charge of attempted murder.

Salander begins to plot her revenge against the man who is responsible for her present predicament and against the political system that victimized her. Mikael Blomkvist and his investigative team at Millennium help her on her quest to prove her innocence and expose crooked officials.

Does her quest for personal redemption and vengeance help innocent people who have been victimized by the corrupt system?

General Reception and Adaptations

The Millennium Trilogy has been a huge success even in translation. The first book in the series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, won many awards including Sweden's Glass Key Award and the Galaxy British Books Award. The ITV3 Crime Thriller of the Year Award for 2008 was bestowed on Larsson posthumously. The third book The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest topped the Amazon Bestseller Chart even before it hit the regular bookstores.

The Swedish film company Yellow Bird and the Danish production company Nordisk Film have co-produced movie versions of the Trilogy. The movies were released in 2009 across Scandinavia. In 2010, extended versions of the films were aired on television as a mini-series in six parts.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Yellow Bird, with Sony Pictures, has signed a deal to make an alternate movie adaptation of all three novels. The first, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, was released in the US on December 21, 2011 and in the UK on December 26, 2011. The other two movies are scheduled to begin production in 2012.

About The Author
Stieg Larsson was a Swedish writer and journalist and the author of the very popular Millennium Trilogy. He worked as a journalist with his main focus being racism and Right-Wing Extremism. He was the founder of the Expo foundation, an organization that works to expose Neo-Nazi activists in Sweden.

Stieg Larsson did not live to see any of his books published. The Millennium Trilogy is his only work, though there is an unfinished manuscript for what is apparently the fourth book in the series.

His Writing Style

His books are crime thrillers. They are dark in tone and focus on political corruption and crimes against women. His narrative style and the story-lines made his books bestsellers, in Sweden and internationally as the books were translated into English and published.

His Personal Life

Stieg Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004. He had written the Millennium novels for his own pleasure and it was not till shortly before his death that he tried to get them published. The novels were all published only after his unexpected death. Stieg Larsson lived with his companion Eva Gabrielsson.