Stieg Larsson - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire & The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

So this is what all the fuss is about! They really are compulsively readable, somehow despite Larsson's technical skills only being okay-to-good at best (the structuring, in particular, is often peculiar, particularly in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) - what pulls them through is the gripping story (with occasional but always effective action sequences) and, even more than that, the characters, and particularly the intriguing Lisbeth Salander. For mine, The Girl Who Played with Fire is the best of the three - it's certainly the most straight-ahead in terms of story, and benefits from having a particularly streamlined plot - but in many respects the three books read as an impressively unitary narrative, building up to the reveals and revelations in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest and unified by their laser-like focus on the ills of contemporary Swedish society.