The book is a reminder of Larsson's strengths and a few weaknesses. Blomkvist's vanity is trying, as every women he meets falls for him, and the reliance on violence as a solution to loose ends is uncomfortable.The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest is not really a standalone read like the earlier novels, but the completion of the trilogy confirms
Larsson as one of the great talents of contemporary crime fiction.
At the heart of the book is a high-level conspiracy that brings together two of Larsson's abiding concerns: hatred of women, and the threat to Swedish democracy posed by right-wing elements in the security service. It solves the mysteries set up in the first two Millennium novels and explains how Salander became what she is: a grown-up and horribly abused version of the popular Swedish children's heroin, Pippi Longscoking. That is sufficient to compensate for the longueurs of the first 100 pages, which involve a lot of business left over from the second volume; new charaters are introduced with bewildering speed to explain the conspiracy against Salander, and is only then that the novel really takes off.
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