Hints and tips:
...An everyday style and background in journalism helps, as does a central female character with a mysterious, darker side and a quest for redemption (think Lisbeth Salander in the Stieg Larsson Millennium...
...As Red as Blood, by Salla Simukka, translated by Owen Witesman, Hot Key Books, RRP£7.99 Pacy Finnish noir with a punky heroine who has more than a whiff of Lisbeth Salander....
...At the same time – as in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code – the trappings of contemporary technology are much in evidence – with Larsson able to spend pages on the capacity of laptops....
...His ambition is to take The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to more than 4.5m copies, and overtake Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, the best-selling paperback of all time....
...In a triumph of literary fiction over the mass market, Mantel’s Wolf Hall briefly topped Amazon’s bestseller list and knocked Dan Brown’s blockbuster The Lost Symbol off the number one spot....
International Edition