So this is it, the conclusion (for author Stieg Larsson can write no more) to the Millennium thriller trilogy that has enlisted slavering fans since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. At close to 600 pages pages, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is as meaty as the first two books. Once more it features Lisbeth Salander, the young super-hacker goth with a horrific past of abusing men, who received a bullet into the head at the end of the previous volume, and Mikael Blomkvist the flinty, personable investigative reporter. This time their goal is to keep Salander free from the clutches of the Swedish secret service.
As with the first two books, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest puzzles veteran thriller readers like me. I have no doubt that if an extravagantly wordy tale like this, with a plot so labyrinthine that I know people who draw massive wall charts to follow it, were to be submitted by a wannabe novelist to an American publishing house, it would be thrown out with the comment ‘cut, cut, cut’. After a skilfully orchestrated beginning, Larsson clogs the huge middle section with an endless array of minor characters, many of them barely sketched for the reader, interacting in complicated ways. Unlike the many Millennium fans I know, I found this section, like the middle of The Girl Who Played with Fire, maddeningly repetitive to the point of tedium. Fortunately Larsson’s fetish for descriptive details helps bind this section together. And then the final third kicks into gear, with Salander and Blomkvist at stage centre, and suddenly I could not put the doorstopper down. A pivotal courtroom scene is as good as any I have read in years. Larsson’s refusal to sentimentalise Salander’s moments of triumph after so long is a towering triumph.
I finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest understanding why fans love the series, and if you’re one such, no doubt you already have this volume. I still find myself wondering whether a talented editor might have pared the mid-book bloat and transformed a compulsive, readable thriller into a genre masterpiece. 3 stars.