The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium Trilogy) Hardcover – Deckle Edge, May 25, 2010

Great read. Non stop action.I think all my friends are family should take the time to experience the world of constant suspense.

THIS IS A REVIEW OF THE RANDOM HOUSE AUDIO PRODUCT (my review of Stieg Larsson's actual story and writing style will come later)For me this was the easiest of the three sets of CD's to rip to Itunes. All of the discs are tagged correctly, which was not the case in the last two audiobooks.Again Simon Vance is the reader and again he makes the book an engaging read. I would not be able to get past all the foreign place names and character names without Vance. Plus he puts the emphasis right where it needs to be in each narrator sentence and each piece of character dialogue. There is just one problem with this particular book in the series that was not a problem with the other books. There are a lot of female characters in Nest. Which is as it should be since one of Larsson's sub themes in the trilogy is an undercurrent of mysogyny in Sweden. When Vance only had to give major character voices to Salander, Salander's girlfriend Mimi, Blomkvist's editor Erika Berger, Blomkvist's sister Angela Ginnini and one female police detective named Merk (?), he did alright. He gave each character her own distinctive voice. This helped me to keep up with each character. But now there are many more female characters who have a big part in the story and Vance's repertoire of female character voices is getting repetitive, which is making it more difficult for me to keep up. I don't blame Vance for this. He is, after all, a man. He does a great job of giving each of the many male characters a distinctive voice. I don't necessarily expect a male actor to have as deep a well of female character voices from which to draw. I think, in the case of this particular book, it would have been a good idea to actually invite a female actress in to voice all the female parts since there are so many of them.THIS IS A REVIEW OF STIEG LARSSON'S STORYI'm impressed that Stieg was able to keep this thriller thrilling even while the heroine spent a good portion of the book confined to a sick bed. I'm also impressed that the many asides about the newspaper business did not detract from the overall story. I liked this book a great deal and found it a fulfilling enough end to the series. I was annoyed by some plot turns Stieg decided to take. The sideplot of Erika Berger having a stalker gave me no insight into her character or the character of her husband or the Swedish newspaper business. The side plot seemed to only serve as a way to introduce the character of Lisa (Liza?) from Milton Security as a kind of rogue ex-cop. Perhaps Stieg intended to use Liza as a continuing character in his decalog but then he dropped dead and the decalog was never completed. But in this particular book the stalker storyline is superfluous. I also thought it was just so wholly unoriginal that the woman for whom Mikael thinks he might fall happens to be an amazon goddess who works out three hours a day and came close to being an olympian. Really Stieg, really? The most gorgeous female character you've introduced in the series is the one who indescribably falls in love with Mikael and with whom Mikael seriously considers going monogamous? When Mikael began a sexual relationship with Harriet Vanger I interpreted it as Stieg showing that Harriet herself was free of her past. The fact that Harriet, a victim of child sexual rape and torture, could have a purely sex-for-pleasure relationship with a man with whom she was not in love and had not built up a history of trust (the way she had with her husband) showed me that Harriet no longer had any inner curses hanging over her head from the things to which her father and brother had subjected her. She was free and this was shown by her freedom to enjoy sex for pleasure without any neurosis. So it was about her and not about Mikael so much. But to have a Constitutional Protection cop with the body of Venus and Serena Williams fall for the admittedly soft Mikael who is also a smoker, well I just couldn't buy it. I'll give Stieg the benefit of the doubt and assume he intended to exploit the relationship for plot purposes in future books in the decalog. That would make sense considering she is a cop who spies on other cops and members of the government who might be suspected of breaking the law. But in this particular story, their relationship annoyed me. What I did like was the very end where the reader could see Lisbeth progressing as a member of society. The pivotal choice she makes at the end of the book, her visit to Paris, her remembering those for whom she needed to buy Christmas gifts, her acceptance of being in debt to others, I really liked these little touches of her budding sense of her own membership in society. I imagine Stieg had hoped to develop Lisbeth's since of that membership and the belonging it confers as the decalog progressed. It's a real shame he was taken from the world of literature at age 50.

Stop the presses! Darn, too late for this. It has been printed and it came out for sale last Tuesday! BIG PROBLEM! I do not know what to do next. When I'm reading it I'm in heaven but inexorably I'm getting close, to paraphrase the text, to the frigging end!I wanted to stop on pg 300 and write this review, now I'm on page 400+ and I cannot contain my excitement and the book has only about 150 more pages. Whoa to me, I'm crying, it has been very very long since I have read a book THIS good! (Doctorow's Billy Bathgate)Pg 374 more or less, only odd even pages are numbered. Exotic, no? So what about Kungsgatan, Drottninggatan, Olof Pames Gata, Holländargatan, Helsingörsgatan. It's me, Mariuxgatan writing Swedish I guess. An unremarkable dude from South Central L.A. not only traveling through Scandinavia (Its Helsinki the capital?) but living though all of these unbelievable alive characters!Man, I know that I'm going to miss them so much - why does this book - this trilogy - has to ever end? I feel that to be with them for the next and remaining 150 pages it's going to consume their tale. But what other choice do I have? Could I be strong enough to quit reading the book right now and console myself with a Louis L'Amour western where the woman are depicted as shallow and featureless as the heroine of this trilogy was supposed to be? Or with the latest book waiting for me on the edge of my bed table, the latest Grisham about this kid lawyer. Will this abate my upcoming suffering? The waxing separation pangs I have felt since pg 1 of this epochal work?Dragon tattooed girl was neither simple nor stupid. She once solved Fermat conjecture about cubed (or higher exponential) numbers and then she goes "Oh, I wish I had met this guy (Fermat) in person!"I was warned by serious book critics that this last book, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest was not polished enough, that Stieg Larsson didn't have enough time to work on this latest gem before succumbing to a fatal heart attack due without doubt to an overdose of caffeine. Just to find that au contraire my chere ami, I'm inside the hornets spiral whirlwind, where we see all the aspects of a problem from the perspective of so many remarkable individuals, from a hospital janitor to the PM (Prime Minister) of Sweden. You move from one newspaper office to the police office and then to a monthly publication office, and then to the houses and the bedrooms of the people involved. I have never read a mystery novel that is dissected into so many aspects or characters.And to experience first hand the remarkable open sexuality in that country from the married woman who with her husband complete agreement has a lover with whom she can spend as many nights as she wishes with only one condition, that she would call her husband to tell him she won't be in that night so he won't worry about her? How do I wish I could find a lady companion so open minded myself?In fact this is the crux of the story in three not large enough books, the sexual and otherwise domination of young girls versus responsible open minded sex. The story how deep corruption goes to dominate and abuse young defenseless kids versus open responsible sex.Mr. Larsson I'll tell ya something, you have written a fantastic work, a story that is different than anything else we'll ever encounter in our lives. I just wish it wouldn't end, I just wish I wouldn't have to go back and read the remaining thin pages of your last book. How do I wish you haven't succumbed to your caffeine addiction and written your originally planed 10 books in the series!

I’m glad I persevered with the trilogy, but this one was hard going like the first as there were LOTS of political facts and information. Larsson went into a lot of detail that may have been a little overkill, but by this third book, I had realised that that was his style, so I just went with the flow rather than not understanding it as I did with the first book.He would go off on tangents, but those tangents might last for a 30-minute chapter, but they would eventually become relevant. However, you would still be sat there chomping at the bit to get on with the main story and to find out Lisbeth’s fate.Despite trudging through all the political facts that Larsson hit you with this was an excellent conclusion to the trilogy and it was rounded off nicely, and everything was tied off, and no loose ends were left.I have considered reading the two books that have been written by David Lagercrantz as follow-ups to Larsson’s trilogy. However, they seem to be starting off a new story albeit following the same characters. So considering that Larsson may or may not have planned to continue the story, I will leave it where he left it before he died. If there was evidence that Lagercrantz was working from notes left by Larsson I may reconsider.

The book picks up where The Girl Played With Fire kicks off, so reading this book soon after finishing the second book really helped me understand what was going on. These books have many characters with similar names, so it's important to have a good understanding of who is who.As with the previous book, there was quite a bit of build up during the first third of the book, but by the time you hit the midway mark, you won't be able to put this book down.There probably isn't as much action as in previous books. Most of the action takes place near the end of the book. This book focuses heavily on espionage and information warfare and there are quite a few sub-plots involving supporting characters. Some of these sub-plots may feel like they don't contribute to the overall outcome, but they are satisfying to a degree and they serve the characters well.All in all, I really enjoyed reading these three books from Stieg. This will go down as one of my favourite series of all time. I don't think I can continue reading the next few books in the series knowing that the author is not the same and that nothing that Stieg planned had been carried over. I think only Larsson could do these characters justice.

Posthumous novels can be SO frustrating either because they are not quite the finished article or, as in this case, because it is SO BRILLIANT that you crave more - and that can never be. This, the third in the trilogy from Larsson is as enthralling as the first two and holds the reader's attention throughout, so much so that I dared hardly blink lest I missed something.A lot of the contents are extremely unsettling and those of you who remember Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (the first in the trilogy) will understand that this author certainly pulls no punches but never resorts to gratuitous language for its own sake. He describes to us, his readers, a tough world, a VERY tough world and the heroes and heroines are not perfect human beings but they do have saving graces and, without giving away the twists and turns of the plot, each development held my full attention.I am sure that other reviews have been written extolling the virtues of the author and this book but if you haven't read them or indeed his books, do yourself a big favour and read them just as soon as you can. Hold on to your hat and 'enjoy' superb writing.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest completes the Salander/Blomqvist trilogy and draws the strands together. While it isn't essential to have read The Girl Who Played With Fire or The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo a new reader may find some of the plot a little baffling in the early stages if they haven't, before the back stories start to kick in.Salander is to stand trial for attempted murder, GBH and other things, and a secretive group in the Secuurity Police would rather that didn't happen. Once again Salander's friends are needed to help her despite herself. This time she is severely hampered by being locked up in a hospital for much of the story. A lot of the plot relies on Salander's computer hacking skills, and were it not for those the story just wouldn't work as the secrets couldn't otherwise be exposed. One can only hope that there aren't too many real Salanders out there reading our computer hard drives and e-mails (or is it all just bunkum?).The problem of too much unnecessary detail and too much repetition that I identified in The Girl Who Played With Fire are repeated here so grit your teeth if you, like me, find that annoying.The story reaches its climax in a courtroom drama, or does it? There is one loose end to tie up, which Larson does by way of an epilogue.There is one major flaw in this book. A sub plot involving Erika Berger, Blomqvist's part time lover and Editor-in-Chief at Millennium magazine. It adds nothing to the story and serves only as a distraction. I guess Larsson had some purpose in telling it, but I'm baffled by what that might be. If you skip through it you won't miss anything important.It is a pity that Stieg Larsson died before his books were published. Had he lived he might have read the proofs and decided to make a few changes for the better. However, once I started reading I couldn't help but staying to the final full stop.

My review is aimed in part, at those who have read some but not the whole trilogy.The Millennium Trilogy has many people praising the three novels but also many who clearly don’t like them. I had read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and very much enjoyed it but had not read the other two. I found that “Tattoo” took some time to get going, but the prose (or at least the translation of it) was very distinctive and the plot was good but I think it was the main characters of Mikael and Lisbeth that remained in my memory.Because of some sight problems I had stopped reading for quite some time, but then bought a Kindle (so that I could enlarge the font size), and kept promising myself I would at some stage read the other two from the trilogy. They are reasonably long novels and was somewhat hesitant as I wondered if I would enjoy them as much as I had the first one.There had been few years between reading the first and then the second and third novels and I had forgotten just what the prose was like – namely all the things that those who don’t like it, will criticise (too long, too descriptive even to the extent of saying the model of computer or phone etc that is being used). But I am so glad that I eventually got round to reading the other two novels - apparently another seven had been planned, and presumably would have been published but for Steig Larsson’s demise.A fourth novel is to be published in 2015 but doesn’t have the approval of Eva Gabrielsson, Larsson’s partner as it will not use the unpublished material which is in her possession.So to sum up, if you have read and enjoyed some but not all of the trilogy I would very much recommend the package as a whole. I would recommend the novels to anyone with the patience for a long but very well plotted story, beautifully descriptive prose and great characters.