Hornet’s Nest is the last novel in Larsson’s Millennium series…also a thoroughly gripping read that shows off the maturation of the author’s storytelling talents …Larsson effortlessly constructs an immensely complicated story line that owes less to the Silence of the Lambs horror genre than to something by John le Carré. It draws together many (though not all) of the loose ends scattered throughout the trilogy… Cutting nimbly from one story line to another, Larsson does an expert job of pumping up suspense while credibly evoking the disparate worlds his characters inhabit… The novel ends in a gory, made-for-the-movies confrontation between Salander and a malignant villain out of a James Bond novel… But the real showdown in this harrowing novel is between Salander and a ruthless government cabal: an equally familiar trope from movie and book thrillers, but one that Larsson manages to reinvent here with dexterity, ardor and a stoked imagination.
...Larsson's books are lively, intricately improbable plots. These, however, are set forth in a banal style that demonstrates no more than minimal skills when it comes to most of his characterizations and descriptive writing ... Hornet's Nest, which carries on without pause from its predecessor, finds Salander near death from a bullet wound to her head and awaiting desperate medical measures ...but physical passivity does not imply helplessness ...Salander is a deeply radicalized feminist, portrayed in a manner designed to test the sympathies of a largely liberal-minded audience, the attention of which is diverted by the blur of his books' nonstop action ....Larsson asks us whether the understanding we normally, casually extend to the principles Salander acts upon can also extend to a character who so heedlessly exemplifies them ... [Salander] adds a certain weight to his entertainments, which has doubtless encouraged the clueless enthusiasm of his reviews.
A bit of advice, though: Dampen down the sky-high expectations. Hornet's Nest lacks the narrative drive, energy and originality of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. Those books, you inhaled. Reading this one feels like work. It's more like a first draft than a polished novel … Lisbeth, a super-smart, ultra-asocial computer hacker, is the reason for the series' popularity. Imagine Pippi Longstocking all grown up … Familiar faces and themes reappear. There is a strong feminist bent to Hornet, particularly in the subplot about Blomkvist's married lover Erika Berger… But instead of complaining about the third novel in the trilogy, let's end with a big thank you for the spellbinding first two.
Book 3, gratifyingly, brings the action back to a place somewhat resembling reality and, in so doing, restores dignity to the franchise ...for fans of the first two books, there are plenty of the Larssonian hallmarks they have come to love... There are moments in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, as there are in the two earlier books, in which Larsson the pamphleteer gets the better of Larsson the novelist ...ham-handed didacticism at times interferes with Larsson’s natural storytelling ability ... Reading Stieg Larsson produces a kind of rush — rather like a strong cup of coffee.
Only now, with the publication of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the third novel in the late Stieg Larsson's immensely popular Millennium trilogy, can we fully appreciate the Swedish writer's achievement ...his trilogy is best understood as a great, sprawling, angry political novel set in Sweden but confronting issues that resonate throughout the Western world ... For much of the novel, she is confined to a hospital as her enemies plot to have her sentenced to prison — or, if that fails, killed — even as Mikael fights to prove her innocence ...suffice it to say that the novel fully lives up to the excellence of the previous two and that it brings the saga to a satisfactory conclusion ...a rich, exciting, suspenseful story, with a huge cast, and involves us deeply in Lisbeth's fate, even as it carries us into all levels of Swedish society.
The final volume, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, has now been published in the United States, and it picks up in the immediate aftermath of its predecessor, The Girl Who Played With Fire … Most of the flaws of the earlier volumes remain. Although there's nothing as egregious as the first 100 pages of Dragon Tattoo, Larsson relies too often on bald exposition, page after page of dry non-narrative that explains necessary historical and political background … What saves the enterprise is Larsson's absolute commitment to the material. He knows how to set a scene and milk it of every last drop of suspense. He understands what makes Lisbeth Salander so fascinating and gives her worthy opponents to struggle against …succeeds in its primary objective, bringing to a satisfying conclusion the dramatic arc begun in the first volume.
…the end of more than seventeen hundred pages of clearly narrated and well-plotted thriller brought me much more satisfaction than dismay …if you enjoy contemporary thrillers with major, larger-than-life main characters, sharp social commentary, and forward moving plots please do pick up those first two volumes and play catch-up …you will find the plunge into the world of modern Stockholm and investigative journalism on the subject of corporate corruption, unsolved murders, and disappearing heirs well worth your time … It’s not Proust, but it’s not John Grisham either …in this third and final installment we see the ultimate repercussions of what began as a magazine journalist’s seemingly tepid new self-assignment …I lingered over pages, languished in them, not wanting the story to end even as the book moved inexorably toward one of contemporary fiction’s most triumphant trial scenes.
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.
Hornet’s Nest is 90 percent government, police, and legal procedural, in which Salander, until the tidily packaged epilogue, has little more to do than send urgent messages to her hacker friends from her hospital bed, and while the story eddies juicily around her, you crave to see her in action ... there is a Dickens-load of characters that Larsson interweaves nicely, but they do little more than fill roles like pieces on a chessboard... Salander is the Garry Kasparov of it all, chess being but one indicator of her tactical genius ... especially in Hornet’s Nest, you’re parched for a flashback or a metaphor or a simile ... The prose forms a chain-link fence of declarative sentences ... These books are a screenwriter’s dream.
Like the first two novels, Hornet's Nest is panoramic in scope with many fascinating characters realistic and grotesque, who are enmeshed in a high-stakes struggle for power and wealth ... Mr. Larsson's narrative moves swiftly among the ever more complex plot lines, enriching the dramatic, even melodramatic, action with accurate historical details of politics, journalism and the law in his country ...an old-fashioned, well-paced political thriller with its roots in Swedish history and a cast of interesting and colorful characters ...his fictional world the good eventually triumph and the wicked are exposed and defeated. That, as Oscar Wilde observed, is why it is called fiction.
With this third book in the series about computer hacker and unjustly abused loner Lisbeth Salander, Larsson breathlessly takes up his tale the day after book No. 2, The Girl Who Played With Fire, left off ... [Larsson's] palette is broader when it comes to showing the corruption of power and the righteousness of idealism ... But his characters have nuance and depth ... Larsson also has tilted the balance of gender roles. A vile misogynist dispatched with scores of women in the first novel, but in this book women have the upper hand ...it feels like the series is ending at a natural spot.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is a stunning finale, a satisfying combination of character and action that ties up the threads left hanging in The Girl Who Played With Fire ... The novel moves in a chronology similar to its predecessors’. At several points, it is interrupted by short interludes discussing the history of women as warriors ... The novel is filled with enough twists to keep even the most astute reader guessing ... The unlikely pairing of equals is complex and rich ... The puzzle is at the fore in a way that begs the reader to solve along with the sleuths. But fiction, ultimately, is about folks, and the folks in this novel are indelible ...it isn’t necessary for closure. Larsson leaves his characters, and the reader, in a place where enough is tied up to be satisfying, and enough is left dangling to allow his characters continuing lives.
The brilliant, damaged, fearless young hacker who was the title character of the international bestsellers The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire returns for the third (and, alas, last) time in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest ...takes off pedal to the metal, directly from the harrowing finale of Fire in which Salander, having been shot and buried in a shallow grave, dug herself out and went after her lifelong enemy with an ax ... somewhat less kick-butt action than the previous books, with more of the story unfolding in courtrooms, boardrooms and newsrooms ... Hornet's Nest doesn't seem to have been written as a finale — there are many loose ends left in Salander's story, and the ending is, if not the cliffhanger of Fire, a new emotional frontier.
The first two books solve separate crimes that reveal kinks in Sweden's culture as well as Salander and her saga. But The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is about the grand conspiracy that has hounded Salander from birth … Some readers suggest that one can pick up Hornet's Nest without reading the previous episodes. I disagree. The three volumes comprise one immense novel, and reading the last without the first two would be like starting on page 1,000. The subject is the abuse of women, and how to combat it … If his reporter's love for information sometimes overwhelms the narrative flow, he kicks back into high gear within a few pages …a rewarding entertainment, and a satisfying solution to the mysteries that surround Lisbeth Salander.
The publication of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest closes the book on one of the most intriguing fictional characters of the new millennia, brilliant but anti-social punkette Lisbeth Salander ... Hornet finds Salander and Blomkvist still apart but converging on the same end: finally bringing to light the conspiracy against her. It's the last chapter for these characters ...a satisfying end, albeit one that comes after a dry and overlong first half ... Of Larsson's three books, Hornet is least able to stand on its own. It introduces no new story lines, just continues right after Fire's conclusion ...you reach a conclusion worth the effort.
Although the beginning is slow, it is worth every minute it takes to read every sentence because the remainder of the novel easily can be completed in one sitting. Complicated as it is, the plot can be summed up in one hyphenated word: cover-up ... A great deal of Hornet's Nest concerns the how and, perhaps as importantly, the why of what was done to Salander in her childhood ... a stunning, multi-leveled work, full of complex plots and unforgettable characters, both of which will stay with you long after you read the final words of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest...fitting and worthy ending to a tale against which many future works in the genre will be judged.
In the third installment of the late journalist Larsson’s unpretty exposé of all that is rotten in Sweden (The Girl Who Played with Fire, 2009, etc.), Lisbeth meets her father, who, we learned a couple of books back, is not just her sire but also her mortal enemy ... Being the resourceful lass that she is, Lisbeth rises from the grave to take her vengeance ... There are some new or hitherto minor players along for the ride, including another Zalachenko creation, a German very-bad-guy named Niedermann, who covers his tracks pretty well ... It’s a delicious mayhem, where no man is quite good and no rich person has the slightest chance of entering the kingdom of heaven. Oh, there are lots of very bad bikers, too ...fast-paced enough to make those Jason Bourne films seem like Regency dramas.
