Book #73: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Title: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Author: Stieg Larsson

When we last saw triple murder suspect Lisbeth Salander at the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire, she had been shot in the shoulder and the head while trying to kill her father and buried in a whole in the ground, near a bunch of dead people. Her friend/erstwhile lover/nemesis/protector Mikael Blomkvist, arrived on the scene just in time to call in the police and wrestle to the ground Lisbeth's half-brother, a giant who can feel no pain. So the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire was a cliffhanger, set up to segue right into The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the final book in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. If The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, was Back to the Future, sort of a stand-alone story, then The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo could be considered Back to the Future II and III, a single very long story divided into two parts for the sake of giving people a break from the intensity (and charging them twice).

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest starts off an hour or two after the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire, with Lisbeth undergoing life-saving brain surgery. She remains under guard, in seclusion in a hospital for most of the novel, while she and Mikael and Erika Berger and a host of other familiar faces go about the task of restoring Lisbeth's basic human rights and bringing down hidden, evil elements within and without the Swedish government. It's extremely complicated, and unless you've read the first two books, probably won't make a heck of a lot of sense, so let's just leave the plot there. One of the things I find most interesting (and sometimes frustrating) about the Millennium books is the way that they're almost entirely unedited (presumably because Larsson died right after delivering them to a publisher) and they show a certain rawness (he describes, for example, exactly what everyone is wearing-- and it's always black pants, a white shirt, and a dark jacket of some sort-- is that a uniform in Sweden or something?).

While I'd ordinarily feel gypped with a single story that spans two novels, I really think it works here. I listened to the book on my iPod, and I was sufficiently gripped by the story to keep listening even when I wasn't driving or doing laundry, and I found the end to be satisfying both intellectually and emotionally. Now I'm just sad that there aren't going to be any more Salander books.