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Recent Reviews
Stephen King
Mixed The Boston Globe Nor will there be any complaints from those quarters about his new collection, Full Dark, No Stars, which consists of one short story and three novellas. They’re all accomplished pieces of genre thriller writing ... Each of the novellas deals to some degree with characters who are seeming Dr. Jekylls on the surface, but deep within hides Hyde, a monster who would as soon take a carving knife to you as shake your hand ...only problem is that this might be one of the more artful pieces of deflection by someone who has been substituting unbelievable human behavior for the way people really act for much of his career, which is what has made him more entertainer than artist ... It’s all good genre stuff, but it doesn’t find that middle ground between literary writing, which King eschews, and shining light on the world.
Stieg Larsson, Translated by Reg Keeland
Mixed Newsday Larsson devotees also know that The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is the third and final book in his posthumous trinity … Much of the narrative reads like a watered-down version of John le Carré's Cold War novels of amoral spies undermining the lives of average citizens for the benefit of the greater good …Larsson's characters fall squarely on either side of the good vs. evil divide and, therefore, aren't interesting enough to carry the political weight of the story … The major problem with Hornet's Nest, though, is that with Salander sidelined, there's not enough happening … Things finally come to life in the epilogue — more than 500 pages in. Frankly, you wouldn't be missing that much if you just skipped ahead.
Stieg Larsson, Translated by Reg Keeland
Positive The Boston Globe Sequels are rarely as good as the originals and The Girl Who Played With Fire is no exception. Salander is still in fine form, but the structural strengths of Tattoo have gotten flabby. It takes the better part of 200 pages for the lengthy story, centering on the Swedish sex trade, to take off ... Still, Larsson is too good a writer to make things dull. If it isn’t the page-turner that the original was, it at least has enough elements to keep things inching forward ... And when Salander reenters the story and starts hacking and kicking and shooting and tazing, things get hot again. She makes Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mrs. Peel from The Avengers look like Henry James characters ... She’s also, though, an incredibly moral person and the way Larsson squares the various parts of her personality is the best part of the book.
Stieg Larsson, Translated by Reg Keeland
Positive The Boston Globe Stieg Larsson is a member of a club few want to join: writers who die before their novels makes it big — in his case before they're even published ... A 450-plus-page whodunit from a rookie normally would inspire suspicions that it might suffer from a lack of discipline. Quite the opposite here. This book is meticulously plotted, beautifully paced, and features a cast of two indelible sleuths and so many juicy suspects that the book's length becomes a plus — though the coda is too insistent on tying up the last loose end ... Blomkvist and Salander are characters you want to spend time with, as their doubts and fears — as they say in Swedish, oy, have they got complexes — constantly joust with their talent and self-confidence. Larsson, meanwhile, deftly works in issues he was concerned about — right-wing extremism, violence against women, a docile Swedish business press — without letting the politics overpower the story.