The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

Title: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Author: Stieg Larsson
Translated from the Swedish: Reg Keeland
ISBN: 9780307269997, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010
Genre: Thriller, #3 in the Millennium trilogy
Rating: A
Source: Amazon Vine

First Line: An estimated 600 women served during the American Civil War.

To those of you who aren't up to speed with Larsson's trilogy, I am going to try my best to avoid giving things away, but it's not going to be easy.

In the last book, The Girl Who Played With Fire, Lisbeth Salander-- portrayed as being worse than the Devil himself by media and police-- confronted her very real, very human, demons. In this book, she realizes that confronting them is not enough. She is going to have to destroy them. What goes against her grain is that she is forced to trust journalist Mikael Blomkvist, even to the point of letting him run large sections of the show.

This book even more than the previous two relies on intricate plotting and the pieces fitting together exactly. This book, more than the other two, showed unevenness and sections that needed a much sterner hand at editing. Because the plot was intricate, Larsson spent pages explaining various government agencies, how they were set up, the people they reported to, and so on. These were the sections of the book that made my eyes glaze over.

Another subplot involving Erika Berger, the former editor of Millennium magazine, although illustrating what many women have to deal with in male-dominated sections of the workforce, was really unnecessary and moved the focus away from the most fascinating characters: Salander and Blomkvist. Even Salander's trip to Gibraltar could have been shortened.

Any time the action moved away from that two-character focus, the book began to drag, which is why I feel that it would have benefited from stricter pruning. But was I greatly disappointed in the book? No. I had to see the outcome of Lisbeth Salander's story. Was she going to succeed? How was she going to succeed?

Larsson has given me a wonderful offbeat Dulcinea and her Don Quixote. I may always wonder what the books would have become if Larsson had been allowed to work on them himself, but the characters will always remain: a young woman who refused to accept that everyone else was more important than she, and the man who believed her.

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Title: The Girl Who Played With Fire
Author: Stieg Larsson
Translated from the Swedish by: Reg Keeland
ISBN: 9781906694159, Quercus Books, 2009
Genre: Amateur Sleuth, Millennium #2
Rating: A+

First Line: Lisbeth Salander pulled her sunglasses down to the tip of her nose and squinted from beneath the brim of her sun hat.

A year has passed, and the Wennerstrom affair has finally calmed down. Mikael Blomkvist is no longer being hounded by the media, but he can't forget the young woman who saved his life: Lisbeth Salander. But Salander has seemingly vanished off the face of the earth, ignoring each and every attempt Blomkvist has made to contact her.

Things haven't remained quiet at Millennium magazine however. Journalist Dag Svensson and his girlfriend, Mia Johansson, have been researching the multi-billion kronor sex-trafficking industry in Sweden, and Millennium is going to run the expose and publish Svensson's book. Before all the facts have been double-checked, Svensson and Johansson are found brutally murdered in their apartment. The prime suspect? Lisbeth Salander. It's up to Blomkvist and the handful of other people who believe in this strange young woman to prove her innocence. As far as Salander is concerned, there's only one person she can rely on to do this: herself.

The first book in this series, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, was one of my Top Ten books last year. I had high hopes for this second book, and I wasn't disappointed. The police investigation into the double murder was stymied at every turn. The "expert witnesses" whose opinions are to be trusted, told the investigators what a menace to society Salander was. However, when they asked the same questions of the people who knew and worked with her, they got an entirely different picture of the woman. It took them valuable time to decide which people they should trust.

Once again, the person at the center of it all-- Lisbeth Salander-- is the most fascinating. As a young girl locked away in a psychiatric hospital, she was asked Why won't you talk to the doctors? To which Salander replied Because they don't listen to what I say. If you don't listen to what this young woman says, she's not going to bother with you. At all. You won't even be a blip on her radar. When I turned the page to see Part IV: Terminator Mode, I didn't bother to hide my grin. This could only mean that Salander was kicking into high gear. I loved seeing how Larsson tied the expose of the sex-trafficking industry and the double murder into Salander's own background, for this book does give insight into what makes Salander tick.

If you want to get to know one of the most fascinating characters in modern fiction, read Larsson's books. Lisbeth Salander will enter your bloodstream like the strongest of narcotics.

REVIEW: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Title: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Author: Stieg Larsson
ISBN: 9780307269751/Alfred A. Knopf
Protagonist(s): Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist, and Lisbeth Salander, a research assistant
Setting: present-day Sweden, north of Stockholm
Series: #1 of the Millennium trilogy
Rating: A+

First Line: The trial was irretrievably over; everything that could be said had been said, but he had never doubted that he would lose.

Mikael Blomkvist, editor in chief and journalist for Millennium magazine has just been found guilty of libel. The best thing for the survival of his magazine is for him to resign and disappear. Out of nowhere, wealthy industrialist Henrik Vanger hands him an assignment on a silver platter: live in a nearby house in Hedeby for a year, investigate the forty-year-old disappearance of his niece, and not only will Blomkvist be paid handsomely, but Vanger will give him the information he needs to destroy Hans-Erick Wennerstrom--the billionaire who sued Blomkvist for libel and won. Blomkvist accepts, little knowing that the assignment will throw him right into the middle of a rattlesnake's den.

The first few pages of this book were a bit slow going, but I was irrevocably hooked when Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, made her appearance. She vaguely reminded me of a favorite character, Carol O'Connell's Kathleen Mallory--another brilliant misfit who has few social skills. Once the investigation into the disappearance of Vanger's niece was concluded, the Wennerstrom finale felt a bit anticlimactic, but the slow start and anticlimactic ending did not lessen my fascination with and enjoyment of this book. Larsson's skill with interweaving the narrative threads of Blomkvist and Salander, with the Swedish setting, and with a complex plot that made me irritable whenever I had to set the book down to do something else fills me with dismay at his untimely death.