The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest

Warning:  Contains some spoilers . . . 

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest is the third and final installment of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.  Having previously read and reviewed the first two (or else why would I read the third?), I finally finished the series.  Unlike the second book in the series, which was an independent story from the original The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (although all of the main characters are the same and it helps to have the background of the first book since the plot is alluded to several times), The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest is a direct sequel to the previous novel, picking up at the cliffhanger ending of The Girl Who Played With Fire.

If you’ve read my previous reviews of the series you know I wasn’t impressed with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (especially considering the hype), but I actually really enjoyed the second book.  Perhaps my expectations had been sufficiently lowered going in the second time.  With The Girl Who Played With Fire ending with Lisbeth shot, clinging to life, and being flown to the nearest emergency room, I was anxious to get back to the story (not that I actually thought Lisbeth would bite it).  The final installment in the series focuses on Mikael and friends trying to get to the bottom of the government conspiracy that resulted in Lisbeth being locked in a mental institution against her will as a teenager, as well as Lisbeth’s fight to clear her name of the murders for which she’s been framed.

As any good conclusion does, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest resolves all of the loose ends from the other books.  Like in the first two books there’s murder, computer hacking, and enough confusing Swedish names to last me for quite some time.  We get more Lisbeth, although because she’s laid up in the hospital for the majority of the book, we don’t quite get to see her in action enough (to the book’s detriment).  And we get more Daniel Craig . . . uhh . . . I mean Mikael, doing his journalist thing and of course hooking up with a new love interest (a la James Bond).  And we get lots and lots of pages full of detail on Swedish government and history that could definitely use some editing (the main problem with the whole series).   I enjoyed the book for the most part, and in particular I thought the courtroom scenes with Mikael’s lawyer sister defending Lisbeth were well done, but the third book mostly served to complete the story from the second one (which is still the best in the series).  I’m sure that Larsson meant a lot of this to be social commentary, but I know little or nothing about Sweden, so it was all lost on me.  Overall, the series is worth the read as a good crime thriller and for the character that is Lisbeth Salander.

Next up:  Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky