Like many people, I was drawn to read this book because of the hype. It seemed as though everyone was raving about this book and Lisbeth Salander, so I figured I might as well give it a shot. While I can’t profess to believe that it deserved all the hype, I do think it was a pretty solid book. I appreciated the uniqueness of the characters, the quality of the mystery, and the departure from an “everyone gets everything they want” ending. With that said, I did find that there seemed to be a fair amount of violence for the sake of violence, and more often than not the violence was aimed toward women. Yes, the central arch of the story relates to violent murder of women, and perhaps the awful things that happen to Lisbeth are meant to lead to bigger things in the future but I am not a fan of rape as character development and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the marked difference between the way violence against men is described as compared to the women. Our male protagonist suffers an attempted strangling and the violation of a kiss, whereas our female protagonist suffers hours of brutal sexual torture. As if that isn’t bad enough, her torture and rape are typically followed by scenes of consensual sex between the male protagonist and his lover. There were at least two instances of this in the book, and to be honest I thought it was a little strange. It was almost as if it was drawing a parallel between our characters by placing them in sexual situations at the same time, but he sexual situations of our female protagonist were in no way similar to the male. Setting all of that aside, as I’m not an authority on the author’s intent with those scenes, the book was good if not a bit long winded. I look forward to seeing where Lisbeth Salander ends up after this.