The Girl with the Sturgeon Tattoo (Lars Arffssen) - St. Martin's Griffin - 2011 - 200 pages

The "Millenium Trilogy" by the late Stieg Larsson (1954-2004) is a self-serving series of mystery novels that was ripe for parody.  Mr. Arffssen (if that is his real name) delivers a saga that is rich with silliness although somewhat thin of plot.  The anti-social, computer-genius Lizzy Salamander is accused of beheading unpublished authors including Twig Arssen (not Stieg Larsson) and there is a video of the deed.  Meanwhile, there is a serial reindeer-killer on the loose who may be working for the president of Ukea (not Ikea) who is worried that consumers may learn that some Ukea products were actually designed by Adolf Hitler.  Things are looking bad for Lizzy until her colleague Mikael Blomberg (not Mikael Blomkvist) learns that Lizzy has an angry fraternal twin sister named Chamelea.  Blomberg, who is " ... overweight, underexercised, and hirsute in all the wrong places ... [and] still an amazing chick magnet ..." and is somehow sexually attractive to every female character in the book including the married woman (Erotikka) whose husband has not the slightest problem with the Mikael-Erotikka liaisons.  Author Arffssen fills the parody with useless technical details, innocuous chapter-heading quotes, and obscure mathematical trivia.  Arffssen got a little bit out of control on page 60 by claiming that "... 187 ... [is] ... smallest quasi-Charmichael number in base 7!"  This cannot be correct because base-7 is a numbering system consisting only of numbers 0,1,2,3,4,5 and 6.  187 is not a possible number in base-7.  There are other errors but who cares?  If you read the Larsson books and found them to be just slightly self-serving and full of coincidences, you may enjoy this parody.  However, if you thought that the Larsson trilogy is excellent literature destined to be classics, run away.  [JAM 11/3/2011]