Harriet Vanger disappeared thirty-six years ago during a summer festival in the Swedish resort of Hedembi. Despite the police investigation, no trace of the sixteen-year-old girl was ever found. Did she run away? Was she kidnapped? Or murdered? No one knows: the case was closed and everyone forgot the details. Everyone, except Harriet's uncle, Henrik Vanger, an elderly industrialist, who has made it his life's purpose to solve the mystery before he dies. On the walls of his office, there are forty-three framed flowers. The first seven were gifts from his niece. The rest arrived anonymously every year on his birthday.

Thus begins "Millennium," a crime and punishment thriller, involving sexual perversion and financial deceit, as well as a tender love story between a tormented journalist and an anorexic girl with tattoos, a computer genius.

The novel was adapted into a film in 2009, the Swedish movie "Man som hatar kvinnor/The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," directed by Niels Arden Oplev, starring Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace in the lead roles.