The first story is short and captivating. A flower is delivered every year on "his" birthday, the first day of November. Curiously, the recipient is not identified. Now he is 82, and he has been receiving these pressed and framed flowers for 44 years. He picks up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell, now retired and living down at Lake Siljan in Dalarna. His remarks are short and to the point, for they have had this discussion many times before and there will be nothing new to add. 

The box had been postmarked from Stockholm and was addressed with handwriting in capital letters, but there was, as always, no return address, no fingerprints, nor any other identifying marks. The pressed flower is from Australia and a species that is rare in Sweden but possibly cultivated by a local botanist. He will hang it on his wall along with the other 43 framed and pressed flowers. They both know what it commemorates, which happens to be the detective's one unsolved case. 

The second plot thread begins as "Carl" Mikael Blomkvist walks out of a courtroom after losing a civil trial for libel and defamation. He had been sued by industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström for his exposé article about Wennerström's supposed Polish arms deal which had been published in Millennium Magazine. The damages will be severe and they might jeopardize the magazine where he is a part owner. He knew going in that he was going to lose the case since he had published the article without attribution because the information had come from a trusted friend.

Other business reporters refer to him as "Kalle" (Carl) Blomkvist, even though it is a name that he hates. It refers to a detective series and he was tagged with it years before when he came to prominence by noting that a notorious burglary gang was holing up in a summer cabin next to where he had been vacationing. The fame which he received from his front row seat had pushed him into a career in journalism. 

The third story introduces Dragan Armansky, who is the founder and the chief executive of the Milton Security Company. He is an odd sort of man with a complicated Eastern European ethnicity as a person with Serbian, Croatian, Muslim, and Jewish backgrounds. Though once a small firm, Milton Security has prospered and now it operates internationally. Besides providing security, Milton is also heavily into background investigations.

In reviewing his business and his career, his mind settles on one of his star employees. Lizbeth Salander is the best undercover operative and investigator he employs. She works freelance and she only reports to him. He dotes on her and views her almost in a fatherly light because she always gets results. Never mind how she gets the results that she does, for Dragon is not close to Lizbeth, and neither is anyone else. He would love to know her better, but for some unknown reason Lizbeth will not allow anyone to get too close to her. She is boyishly slight of build and her body is covered by tattoos, one of which is the dragon in the title of this book. Lizbeth will prove to be one of the most fascinating characters in all of literature.

With all of the chess pieces in place on the board, it becomes time for Larsson to set the game in motion. An elderly lawyer from the north of Sweden walks into Dragan's office and wants to hire the firm to do a hush hush investigation of Mikael Blomkvist. Dragon knows that there will be no one better for this job than Lizbeth. Copyright 2005 by the Norstedts Agency. Translated into English in 2005 by Quercus Publishing, PLC, London, and American copyrighted in 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, a division of Random House.