The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo needs a hundred pages to warm up

Stick with it. The start is a lot of Swedish financial journalism and I almost returned it. Then Lisbeth Salander properly enters the story, an old man hires someone to solve a forty-year-old disappearance on a private island, and I lost a whole weekend.

A warning: some of the violence against women is very hard to read. It's meant to be, since that's the point of the book, but you should know it's there before you start.