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| The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest |
Even though The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is the last book there will ever be in this series by Stieg Larsson, I thought it was a great end. First, I was glad that it actually had an ending. The second book in the series, The Girl Who Played With Fire, didn’t have one; it just lead right into the third. Second, and unusually for Larsson, it ends on a note of unadulterated hopefulness.
In The Girl Who Played With Fire, Lisbeth Salander (possibly the best character created in the last decade or more) confronted her father, a Russian defector who was protected by the state Security Police. She sustained such terrible injuries that, if this hadn’t been a work of fiction, she would have died. Consequently, she spends the first half of the book in a hospital. Larsson manages to keep the tension level high throughout by switching his perspective between two opposing forces: Salander’s friends and Salander’s enemies.
Mikael Blomqvist, the investigative journalist who was the main protagonist of the first book before Lisbeth stole the show, marshals Salander’s friends together because he knows that there’s no way she’s going to get a fair trial. As a joke, he names their group the Knights of the Idiotic Table, because the person they’re trying to protect is so pig-headed.
On the other side are the security agents who believe that if Salander walks free, everything they’ve been trying to keep secret will come out and that they’ll all serve fat jail sentences. Which is true, because in their zeal to weed out communists and enemies of the state, they broke a lot of laws. Since they’re still working for the government, they have a lot of power. Documents disappear, are stolen, or are forged. Prosecutors are manipulated. Evidence is planted. Just when Blomqvist and his allies get ahead, the Sapo (Security Police) knock them back again.
Throughout the book, these two forces wrestle back and forth. Lisbeth, who refuses to speak to the police and the psychiatrists, has her own plans, too. She doesn’t seem too worried about the possibility of jail time. She’s after revenge, something she does best. After the gore of the second book, it was kind of refreshing to get back to the brainy investigation and double-crossing of the first book.
Everything comes together at the end and it is very satisfying to see everyone getting what they deserved. There were a few times when I doubted the Knights ability to get Salander vindicated. And oh there were some real villains in this book. Those Sapo agents had no scruples about what they’d do. Things look very grim for Lisbeth for a lot of the book.
One thing I didn’t totally understand was Larsson’s characters harping on about the constitution all the time. Whenever someone mentioned that if the Sapo’s secrets come out, it could mean the end of their agency and they freak out about a “constitutional crisis.” I don’t know much about how the Swedish government is constructed. I think it’s similar to the British system. Every time someone mentioned the constitution, I thought about what might have happened if the story had played out in the United States. There would have been some hearings. Some people might have spent some time in jail. But no one would have been as worried about the constitution as the Swedes were.
I’ve read that Larsson had plans for more books after these three. I would have loved to have seen them, because Lisbeth and Mikael are so fascinating to watch. And really, these are some of the best mystery/thrillers I’ve read in a long time. It’s such a shame that Larsson died before he got a chance to see how wildly popular these books became.