Re-read: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest

 The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest was the last book in the Millenium trilogy that Steig Larsson wrote before he died. The first book in the series was like a locked room mystery (though its setup was unlike any I'd seen). The second book started like a police procedural and ended up being a thriller. This last book started out like an espionage story, ran through the middle like a courtroom drama, and ended like a thriller. It's great, intense reading, and never fails to point to how women are treated even in Sweden, which to my mind is one of those Northern European countries that consistently seem to have it together.

Lisbeth Salander, the girl referred to in the title of all the books, plays a mostly passive role in the story. Picking up where everything left off in the second book, that's entirely reasonable, since there's only so much you can do while recovering from brain surgery. The plot revolves around her background, however, and all the events that led up to the first book are revealed. Blomkvist returns, and does behave a lot like the protagonist of the novel.

The book has aged quite a bit since 2010 when it came out. For one thing, back then, the United States still felt like a democracy where the rule of law mattered. Today, I would be very surprised if a novel came out with a sentence like this one:

Armansky had Blomkvist’s copy of Lidbom’s book An Assignment, and he was reading it with gathering astonishment. If this were the United States a dozen or so senior Säpo hands would have been arrested for obstruction of justice and forced to appear before a public committee in Congress. In Sweden apparently they were untouchable. (kindle loc 18671 in the kindle omnibus edition which is no longer sold!)

Nevertheless, the clue that the book is fiction is that everything ties up neatly, the bad guys are found (and revealed to be incompetent), and there's a happy ending of sorts. Like many franchises, this one sold too well to leave alone, and the publisher found another novelist to continue the adventures of Lisbeth Salander. A sample came with the book but after reading Larsson's writing it's clear that whoever followed him just doesn't have what it takes.