Swedish Hit Lands in France, Headed to U.S.

Swedish financial journalist Stieg Larsson wrote the Millennium thriller trilogy in his spare time; the first book was released in his home country shortly before his death in 2004. The final installment, Castles in the Sky, is now #1 in Sweden and the first volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is in third place in France. The second volume, The Girl Who Played with Fire, landed at #10 in France. Knopf will publish Tattoo in the U.S. in September and has the rights to the two other books.

Spanish novelist Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles is off to a strong start in the U.S., where Random House released it earlier this month, and his newest, A Day of Rage, debuted at #2 in Spain in December. The historical novel deals with the 1808 rebellion in Madrid against the French occupation. While The Secret remained atop the Spanish nonfiction list, seven of the next nine spots are occupied by new titles. The fourth-place title, The Solitude of the Judge, is a profile of Javier Gomez Bermudez, who presided over the trial of terrorists convicted of bombing a Madrid train station in 2004, written by his wife, Elise Beni. Beni was fired as a spokesperson for a Madrid regional court because she used confidential information supplied by her husband to write the book.

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