The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo & The Girl Who Played With Fire & The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest

I enjoyed this trilogy of books.

I like when there are different plots and characters that you would otherwise think have nothing to do with the other and the author somehow weaves them together. The girl with the tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, is paired together with the owner of a financial magazine, Mikael Blomkvist, and both appear to be from opposite ends of the world – but they work together to solve a 40 year old murder mystery.

The first book starts a little slow with the background info of who is who, but it picks up well and continues strong. I watched the movie after because I know they tend to leave out a lot. The movie was good also.

In all three books and movies, they did a few things differently, but it didn’t take away from the main story line – Lisbeth Sanders is intelligent, a bit of an introvert socially and she is the key to all the questions the story seeks to answer. I never knew what the real story was here, other than she was some sort of detective, but the story is about a lot more than that. She worked for a security firm and is excellent with computer – but once again, you’re gonna have to read the story to find out anymore!

The 2nd book, the Girl Who Played With Fire was good as well. It continued with the same major characters as book one and added a few others. The movie was good but the book always give you more back story, mostly into the minds of the characters.

The 3rd book, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest sums up everything from the first two books.

All in all, a page turner if you can get past all the history the late author gives. Each book is about 400 pages each!

The End of California by Steve Yarborough

Can’t fully recall what drew me to read this book, but on the cover is the picture of a Piggly Wiggly store and that reminded me of the summers I spent in South Carolina with my aunt. Piggly Wiggly was the store she shopped in. So perhaps that’s what attracted my attention. It turned out to be a good story. It’s about a man who always seems to be on the run from something. And the something always has to do with a woman.

Pete Barrington left Mississippi for California to attend school and he ended up becoming a doctor. When he jeopardizes his career with an affair, he moves his family back to his hometown in Loring, Mississippi, of which I call Smalltown, USA because everybody knows everybody else’s business. His wife isn’t happy about this move and neither is his daughter. It turns out that when Pete first left Mississippi to attend college in California, it really was because of a woman. His homecoming opens a can of worms that he never thought would bother him again. Or lead to someone’s death.

This is one of those stories that you won’t want to put down. The author has a way of interestingly stringing you along until midway the book before some answers are revealed.

The author is A PEN/Faulkner finalist, and he has received the Mississippi Authors Award, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award, and an award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Emerson College and lives in Massachussets.