While Eva Magnus and her daughter, Jenny, are taking a walk, they discover a dead body floating along the riverside. Eva runs to the nearest phone booth and pretends to call the police. Then she leaves the body for someone else to find. Why? Konrad Sejer, the police officer investigating the case, links it to another unsolved murder of a woman killed in her bed. A woman that used to be a childhood friend of Eva Magnus...

Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle suspects murder and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, ruthless computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet's disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from almost forty...