Review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - Stieg Larsson (2007)


Scandinavian crime fiction has had something of a renaissance in recent years, and I've been slow to hop on the bandwagon. I've barely seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the talents emerging from the chilly north, but Stieg Larsson's posthumous Millennium trilogy has been a very good place to start.


Following on from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire, Hornet's Nest sees Lisbeth Salander, the titular Girl, guarded in a hospital bed, charged with attempted murder and declared a mentally unstable threat to society. Salander is a loose end in a conspiracy that goes to the highest levels of Sapo, the state security police, and her very existence threatens to send the world of the corrupt men responsible crashing down.

Where Dragon Tattoo can be read effectively as a stand alone novel, Played with Fire and Hornet's Nest are two halves of the continuing story, the latter picking up only minutes from where the former left off and relentlessly pursuing answers to the questions set up in the first two novels. Larsson is not one to shy away from detail and his plotting is extremely well thought out - his technical descriptions are almost Crichton-esque in places and he manages his cast of hundreds adeptly. The prose, translated from Swedish by Reg Keeland, bristles with tension and the speedy pacing makes it a hard one to put down.

I get the most out of crime fiction when I don't know what's coming, and I was happily unsure of where Hornet's Nest was heading right until the end. I wasn't sure whether Larsson would let us off the hook with a happy ending, or whether he would have it all falling down around us. Even better, I wasn't sure which of those options I would have preferred.

Lisbeth Salander is one of the most compelling and complicated characters I have ever encountered - a fiercely reclusive pocket rocket with an unflinching moral compass. Mikael Blomqvist, celebrity journalist, shows shades of Sherlock Holmes in his investgations and never falters from his determination to stamp out corruption. Together, Salander and Blomqvist make a terrific duo and their alliance throughout this trilogy is fascinating as it unfolds.