The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson

Fast-paced, thrilling and with meaningful subplots woven throughout, this gets a HolySmokesMustRead rating. Lisbeth Salander has become nothing less than a personal hero of mine. Once I got into reading it, there literally was no putting it down and I found myself sneaking mere minutes here and there to catch up with the plot, the characters, to find out, in the best tradition of storytelling, what happened next. Good grief, but I'm insanely jealous that I didn't write this book, and thankful to Larsson that he did.