The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is Lisbeth Salander, an unlikely and uniquely strange heroine. A math genius, Salander is a master hacker, the best in the business, and previously employed by a research and security firm in Stockholm. We meet her in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when she is employed by social activist writer, Mikael Blomkvist, part owner of Millenium Publishing who in turn is hired by the patriarch of wealthy Swedish Vanger family to research family secrets. Salander and Blomkvist forge a strange but loyal friendship. Having gone through a horrific childhood in the hands of her father and the Swedish mental health system, Salander has serious relationship problems. Salander is a loner. She chooses who she works for, works with deliberate accuracy and has no qualms about intruding into other people's privacy or operating outside the law. Skinny as a young boy, she is capable of changing her identity and fading away if she does not want to be found. Tenacious, resilient, cunning and extremely resourceful, Salander can exact revenge on those who have harmed her and fight to the end those who plan her demise.
The writing is fast paced and gripping and the reader is compelled to keep on reading to the last page to learn what happens to this unlikely heroine. As in the first two books, Hornet's Nest is entertaining and answers many questions from Tattoo and Fire. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is long, meanders somewhat in the beginning but becomes more action packed in the last 200 pages as the reader wonders how Salander will get out of her predicament. If she survives a head wound, will bad guys succeed in killing her? If she survives both, how will she evade her enemies in the Swedish government who are determined to return her to the modern dungeons of the mental health system.
While the Millenium Trilogy is a mystery series, the books actually decry violence to women and speak to the threats to the Swedish democratic system. So few writers are able to weave social statements into a spell-binding novel and here, Larsson excels. Stieg Larsson was a social activist from a very young age. He was a spokesperson against racism and right wing extremists who try to influence youth into white supremacy ideology. He founded the Swedish Expo Foundation and became editor of its magazine, Expo. His life was under constant threat. He submitted manuscripts for the three Millenium books just before his death of a heart attack in 2004. It is rumored that there was to have been a series of 10 books and that he had written the beginning and ending of a fourth book. To the reader's misfortune, a future book is unlikely due to some estate problems which pit Larsson's father and brother against Larsson,s lifelong companion Eva Gabrielsson who had been a collaborator in the research of the novels.
Larsson was the second bestselling author in the world in 2008. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was adapted to the screen in Sweden and released under the title, Men Who Hate Women starring Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander and Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomkvist. Sony and producer Scott Rudin bought the rights to an English language remake and a US version is soon to come. Besides leaving a wonderful trio of mystery novels, another Larsson legacy is that his success has brought the works of Swedish writers into the international scene such as earlier writer Hakan Nesser whose crime novels featuring Inspector Van Veeteren have been translated into English.
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