The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (original title in Swedish: Män som hatar kvinnor – literally, men who hate women) is a crime novel by the late Swedishauthor and journalist Stieg Larsson. It is the first book of the "Millennium series" trilogy, which, when published posthumously in 2005, became a best-seller in Europe and the United States.Larsson's regret of not helping a young girl named Lisbeth, whom he saw being raped when he was 15, manifested in his character of the same name, also a rape victim. Larsson writes within the novel, in Chapter 12, "It's actually a fascinating case. What I believe is known as a locked room mystery, on an island. And nothing in the investigation seems to follow normal logic. Every question remains unanswered, every clue leads to a dead end."

PROLOGUE

A Friday in November

"It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to LakeSiljan in Dalarna. They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.

It arrived.

What is it this year?

I don‘t know what kind it is. I‘ll have to get someone to tell me what it is. It‘s white.

No letter, I suppose.

Just the flower. The frame is the same kind as last year. One of those do-it-yourself ones.

Postmark?

Stockholm.

Handwriting?

Same as always, all in capitals. Upright, neat lettering.

With that, the subject was exhausted, and not another word was exchanged for almost a minute. The retired policeman leaned back in his kitchen chair and drew on his pipe. He knew he was no longer expected to come up with a pithy comment or any sharp question which would shed a new light on the case. Those days had long since passed, and the exchange between the two men seemed like a ritual attaching to a mystery which no-one else in the whole world had the least interest in unravelling.The Latin name was Leptospermum (Myrtaceae) rubinette. It was a plant about four inches high with small, heather-like foliage and a white flower with five petals about one inch across.

The plant was native to the Australian bush and uplands, where it was to be found among tussocks of grass. There it was called Desert Snow. Someone at the botanical gardens in Uppsala would later confirm that it was a plant seldom cultivated in Sweden. The botanist wrote in her report that it was related to the tea tree and that it was sometimes confused with its more common cousinLeptospermum scoparium, which grew in abundance in New Zealand. What distinguished them, she pointed out, was that rubinette had a small number of microscopic pink dots at the tips of the petals, giving the flower a faint pinkish tinge......"

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