The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson
I can’t really do a summary without any spoilers for the previous two books so I’ll just say that this picks up just where The Girl Who Played with Fire left off. And it’s more of the same intense story.
I still think the first one of the three was the best but this one (and the second one) weren’t any slouch either. After finishing this one, I wanted to go right back to the beginning and read all three again. I just loved that this trilogy was just go, go, go. From the first page of the first book to the last page of the last book.
The only complaint I had with this (and the second book) was that if you haven’t just read the previous book (and I hadn’t) you’re going to be a little bit confused. Larsson just has so many characters that it’s almost impossible to keep track of them. It’s not that big of a deal because he does a pretty good job of bringing you up to speed about what happened in the previous books (without if being boring and redundant if you have just finished the previous books.) Also, I found that even though I couldn’t totally remember who was who, it didn’t really matter. As long as I remembered, good cop or bad cop (and even if I didn’t – it became pretty obvious very quickly) I was okay.
I think what sets this book apart from others like it is the fantastic story-telling. Larsson sure knew how to weave a tale. And weave he did. There were so many different things going on that all had to come together in the end and make sense and they did! Just like this others, I couldn’t put this one down but when I had to, I wasn’t completely lost when I was able to get back to it. Sometimes I find books like this with so much going on are hard to follow but that wasn’t the case with this one. I’m just sad that I won’t be able to read more from Larsson.
