The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson

There are certain basic techniques that any haf decent writer will employ in such a way that the reader will barely notice. Such things as;

1) Show not tell
2) Unobtrusive exposition
3) Including detail that's relevant and excluding that which is not
4) Choosing a narrative point of view
5) Controlled revelation of plot

This novel fails in all of these basic facets.

1) Lots of information is provided by the flat authorial voice. At one point we are told that the heroine's friend has a feeling of dread, then that her mother gives her a haunted look and then the author tells us that it's almost as if she's had an ominous premonition, all on the one page. Well, duh.
2) Exposition is too often through chunks of uninteresting third person prose, or (cardinal sin) characters having conversations that contain the phrase "As you know, xxx..."
3) I did not need to know about the heroine's choice of IT hardware, the hero's reading habits or the details of most of the violence. In a long book, much could have been omitted.
4) POV switches all over the place, often in the same paragraph. Simple incompetence on the author's part.
5) A central revelation is obvious from the prologue but only "revealed" towards the end. The heroine engages in a sadistic set-piece to access bank funds from her evil guardian, but later cleans out a major corporation through what sounds like a simple piece of hacking, suggesting that the earlier unpleasantness was simply unnecessary. And so on.

OK, its a piece of populist thriller writing that perhaps I shouldn't analyse so critically, but I ca't believe that this is so popular even amongst sophisticated readers. Larsson is a little better than Dan Brown on a sentence-by-sentence basis but in the end The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is, in some ways, even worse than the Da Vinci Code. When you are writing about a subject as serious and upsetting as sexual violence, you must do it with more skill and sensitivity than this.