Readers who will have snagged a copy of Stieg Larsson's newest thriller The Girl Who Played with Fire (it's out in the UK, translated from the original Swedish; US edition is coming in July) will have noticed that female protagonist Lisbeth Salander satisfies her nascent interest in spherical astronomy with the help of a book titled "Dimensions in Mathematics," written by one L. C. Parnault and apparently published by Harvard University Press in 1999.
Unfortunately for those of you who would like to follow in Lisbeth's footsteps and penetrate the "dimensions of mathematics" for yourselves, you'll have to turn somewhere other than the work of the esteemed Dr. Parnault, for as far as we can tell, and if our memories and our computers have not completely failed us, HUP has in fact published no such work, in 1999 or at any other time. Thus it seems that Mr. Larsson, whose Scandanavian crime fiction has won him a good deal of posthumous fame, leaves us with more than just fictional mysteries. We can only speculate about what Dr. Parnault would have been like, had we actually known or published him, and as for the contents of his mythical "Dimensions," well, that's an even greater mystery. For all we know, it could be the key to the universe or something, and now it's gone missing! So if you've spied a copy of "Dimensions" in some musty back-alley secondhand shop, or know the whereabouts of our friend Dr. Parnault, or if somehow you yourself are Dr. Parnault, just, um, get in touch.
