Lisbeth Libby[citation needed] Salander is a fictional character created by Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson in his award-winning Millennium series.

She first appeared in the 2005 novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as an antisocial computer hacker with a photographic memory who teams up with Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of a magazine called Millennium.

The character has been positively received, with David Denby writing that Lisbeth Salander clearly accounts for a large part of the Millennium series' success.

In the various film adaptations of the novels, actresses Noomi Rapace, Rooney Mara, and Claire Foy have all received praise for their portrayals of the character.

[8] Salander visits a clinic in Genoa between the first and second books, where she had her wasp tattoo removed as she felt it was "too conspicuous and it made her too easy to remember and identify".

[11] On the other hand, Larsson stated that he thought that she might be looked upon as something of an unusual kind of sociopath, due to her traumatic life experiences and inability to conform to social norms.

", Melissa Burkley, Ph.D. and Dr. Stephanie Mullins-Sweatt write: "Although Salander is antagonistic and violent, she doesn't appear to lack a conscience, which is the hallmark trait of a psychopath.

"[14]Writers have described Salander as a "fiercely unconventional and darkly kooky antiheroine",[12] a "superhero",[15] a "misfit", and "an androgynous, asocial, bisexually active... loner who makes a living as a computer hacker..."[16] Jennie Punter in Queen's Quarterly wrote that "the diminutive, flat-chested, chain-smoking, tattoo-adorned, anti-social, bisexual, genius computer hacker Lisbeth Salander" has become "one of the most compelling characters in recent popular fiction".

[17] In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), Lisbeth Salander is introduced as a gifted, but deeply troubled, researcher and computer hacker working for Milton Security.

Her boss, Dragan Armansky, commissions her to research disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist at the behest of a wealthy businessman, Henrik Vanger.

When Blomkvist finds out that Salander hacked his computer, he hires her to assist him in investigating the disappearance of Vanger's grandniece, Harriet, 40 years earlier.

When Palmgren suffers a stroke, the court appoints her a new guardian: Nils Bjurman, a sadist who forces Salander to perform oral sex in return for access to her allowance.

A few days later, she returns to his flat and, after disabling him with a taser, tapes his mouth and fastens him to his bed with his own bondage equipment, and finally sodomizes him with a huge anal plug.

Salander later uses her hacking skills to discover that Harriet Vanger is alive and hiding in Australia, and to get sensitive information about Blomkvist's arch-nemesis, corrupt media magnate Hans-Erik Wennerström.

Zalachenko had been a high-ranking member of the GRU, and his defection was regarded by Säpo as an intelligence windfall, thus leading to the Section's covering up his subsequent illegal activities.

Salander eventually writes, and passes to Giannini, an exact description of the sexual abuse she suffered at Bjurman's hands, but written in such a way as to make it sound hallucinatory so as to mislead the prosecution.

Giannini then destroys Teleborian's credibility by introducing the recording of Salander's rape and produces extensive evidence of the Section's plot, published in Millennium that morning by Blomkvist.

In The Girl in the Spider's Web (2015), written by David Lagercrantz as a continuation of the original series, Salander is hired by scientist Frans Balder to find out who hacked his network and stole his quantum computer technology.

Salander learns the Spider Society is led by her twin sister Camilla, a sociopath who as a child tormented her and delighted in the abuse their mother suffered at their father's hands.

She then supplies Blomkvist with information she hacked from the NSA, which he uses to write an exposé article that results in the arrests of Camilla's accomplices and re-establishes Millennium as the most influential news magazine in Sweden.

In the 2011 English-language film adaptation of the first book, Salander is played by Rooney Mara, who received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance.

David Denby of The New Yorker stated that the character of Lisbeth Salander clearly accounts for a large part of the novels' success.

"[20] Likewise, Muriel Dobbin from The Washington Times dubbed her one of the most fascinating characters to emerge in crime fiction in years; "Her remoteness and her capacity for anger and violence are in contrast with a desperate vulnerability that she reveals only to the most unlikely of people.

"[21] Reviewing the first Swedish film, Roger Ebert noted that it is "a compelling thriller to begin with, but it adds the rare quality of having a heroine more fascinating than the story".

[22] The Independent's Jonathan Gibbs called the character "a vision of female empowerment – a kind of goth-geek Pippi Longstocking," but also an "agglomeration of clichés.

"[23] Richard Schickel of Los Angeles Times suggested that Salander represents something new in the thriller genre; "She's a tiny bundle of post-modernist tropes, beginning with her computer skills.

"[24] Laura Wilson wrote in The Guardian that by Lagercrantz's third continuation novel, The Girl Who Lived Twice (2019), "the main characters have, sadly, become subject to the law of diminishing returns – in particular Salander, who is now just another all-purpose kick-ass heroine.