Drop Slot Reviews: Not about folks who could settle down and raise a family

The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

After heaving finished Stieg Larsson's crime thrillers, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire, I eagerly awaited the opportunity to read the last in the series, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Knopf, 2010 -translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland), but was thwarted for quite some time by a series of screw-ups and unfortunate technological problems.

Back story: I had downloaded the first two novels from the Greene County Public Library's digital download site and assumed that I would also be able to do so for the third book, since they offered the entire collection. I reserved the book, and when my place in line came up, which took about three weeks, I was notified by email that I had two days in which to download it or else my hold would expire. I was busy reading something else, so I waited the two days. When I finally went to download it, I found that my window of opportunity had closed just one hour before. Drat!

Three weeks later, it was my turn again. This time I wasted no time in attempting to download the file. Unfortunately, I ran into a technological problem that I attributed to a combination of prime-time Internet bandwidth problems and my generally slow DSL connection. In short, the damned thing never finished downloading; it just went on-and-on until I finally gave up and tried again. However, when I retried downloading, I was informed that I had already downloaded it. Three weeks later, it was available to me again and I tried it over with the same results. In the interim, I had downloaded and read another novel without a hitch.

So, I tried one more time and had the same problem. It appeared to me that the file for the e-book was corrupted, but there was no way to report the problem. (I have since told this story to the Yellow Springs Branch Librarian Connie Collett who said she would look into it.) I finally resorted to reserving a hard copy of the book, which arrived in another couple weeks. Two things to note here: These are very popular books in high demand; and I showed uncharacteristic determination in my desire to read that final novel.

And now for the review: The three novels each have two protagonists, a sociopathic computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander, and a womanizing investigative journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, who spends most of his time in the last two novels trying to save Salander from herself and a variety of villains who alternate between trying to kill her and trying to have her committed to a mental institution. The stories are told in the omniscient third-person, but shift point-of-view from character to character.

For most of Hornet's Nest, Salander is either hacking computers from her bed in a hospital where she has undergone surgery to remove a bullet from her brain, or in court, dodging legal bullets with Blomqvist's sister as her attorney. Blomqvist, meanwhile, continues to "screw his way through life," as his sister describes it to Salander, while dueling with a secret arm of the Swedish Security Service on Salander's behalf and writing his next blockbuster expose.

As I have noted in the past, the plots are extremely complex; Larsson's journalistic attention to detail borders on compulsive; and there is no shortage of sex and violence, including rape, dismemberment, skulls being split with axes, feet being nailed to floors and the comparatively normal, occasional bullet in the head. And I can't seem to get enough of this stuff.

Unfortunately, Larsson died shortly after delivering the manuscripts for the entire collection, but, not without wrapping up the tale quite nicely in the last few paragraphs. In the end good triumphs over evil, but only in relative terms, and at least one of our protagonists has evolved from hopelessness to showing signs of hope.

Reviews of the previous two novels in the series:

The Girl Who Played With Fire: Sex and violence, pop culture and quadratic equations

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Two novels for the not-so-queasy

Reader reviews of materials available at or through the Yellow Springs Library are encouraged and appreciated.