Book 6: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest – Stieg Larsson

I first want to say it irks me that the title is grammatically incorrect on the US version (Hornet’s versus Hornets’). It is a nest of hornets not one hornet’s nest.

I read this book in just under 48 hours, and it was well worth the time and wait it took to get a hold of a copy. I first read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo as part of a book group we started during my year of AmeriCorps. Although the book was originally scheduled for after the group disbanded, I still wanted to read it. I read both Tatto and The Girl Who Played With Fire as fast as Hornets’ Nest.

The Girl who kicked the Hornets’ Nest was an amazingly swift read and although it took me a few chapters to get back into who each of the characters were, Fire came back to me. The plot is swift moving and if you’re reading it in brief snippets or even only half paying attention it will quickly leave you asking more questions than the book intents. It picks up right where Fire left off and dives right into the complex and incredibly confusing underworlds that interconnect throughout the Millennium series. The depth and breath and the ways in which Larsson deals with investigations (legal, media and personal) is astounding, his characters leave nothing unturned. At sometimes this does seem a bit ostentatious, or that there are only so many people in the entire country of Sweden, but then the reader is reminded that this is an incredibly public affair dealing with numerous high-profile individuals and it sort of falls back in to place.

I don’t want to ruin it for anyone and clearly this isn’t a great review, but clearly I think everyone should read this for the following reasons:

1. I rarely get excited about crime type novels (last one was one of Grisham’s early 2000 law thrillers)
2. The series has a kick ass feminist protagonist and some brilliantly written female characters (as well as some eerily creepy male characters).
3. They are thrilling reads that suck you in and you don’t want to put down the books until you’re finished.
4. The sheer curiosity factor that there were originally eight novels in the Millennium series and Larsson only finished three and a quarter before he died.
5. And really some of his descriptions – I’ll have to reread them at some point to fully embrace the beauty in his descriptions of some things, but it’s a very Scandinavian concept.

I will say the one thing I was most worried about was that Larsson would have left a huge cliff hanger at the end of Hornets’ Nest as he did at the end of Fire, but thankfully everything was resolved. There are clearly ways the story can go, but overall I feel that they can remain the way they are, but you can be damned sure I will be purchasing/reading the 4th book if it is ever published, even if it ends with the most frustrating cliff hanger, I will read it.

There have been some interesting blogs I have read recently about the choice of the word ‘Girl’ in the title and I cannot for the life of me find them. They may be from Bitch Magazine, but I can’t seem to place them. I do fully recommend checking them out as I learn something new from them everyday! (I thoroughly enjoyed this one about how heterosexist, anti-woman/gay and misogynist torrent websites are.)