Fans of a boy named Milo, a watchdog called Tock and a pompous Humbug had reason to rejoice on Wednesday — the day that a picture book called The Odious Ogre was released. Written by Norton Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer, the book marks the first time that Juster and Feiffer have collaborated since creating The Phantom Tollbooth together in the early 1960s.

"As far as mystery fiction goes. . .Larsson is the tippy-top of a Nordic literary iceberg that has been moving inexorably into our waters over the past few decades. Before The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo landed in this country in 2008, Henning Mankell was the mystery writer everybody was raving about. Mankell's fellow Swedes Helene Tursten, who writes very good police procedurals, and Kerstin Ekman, whose novel Blackwater was a standout, also made their mark. So have Karin Fossum and Jo Nesbo from Norway, and the late crime master Janwillem van de Wetering from Holland. If the years between the World Wars were the "Golden Age" of British mystery, we've surely entered a new "Ice Age.""