Overall, I would say that The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a solid read. However you have to get through the very slow moving first half of the book to figure this out. If you can go into this book knowing that you have to be extremely patient before it really picks up, then I think the long wait will be worth it.
The plot was intense and very well contrived. There were many characters in the book and were difficult to follow in the beginning since so many were being introduced. The relationships between all of the characters were extremely complex, intertwined and suspensful. Such dynamics made for interesting complications and twists within the story.
I think I can relate my lack of interest with the book to the fact that the author seemed to give description upon description of mundane, day to day happenings which made it hard for me to keep my mind on the story itself. I ended up skipping around a lot to get to the more interesting points of the story, well into pgs. 200. I did like the way that Stieg Larsson ended the book. I thought the author did a great job envisioning the entire course of events right through to the end of the story. It read like it was well thought out and planned, despite the long stalled beginning.
Stieg Larsson follows the ending with an excerpt from his follow up book, The Girl Who Played With Fire and it is just jaw dropping. A friend of mine has already read The Girl Who Played With Fire and says that from the beginning it is gripping and way better than The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Despite the slow moving beginnings of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I would read The Girl Who Played With Fire.
