Swedish writers are all the rage, thanks to Henning Menkel and Stieg Larsson, yet this is hardly a new phenomenon as most English language readers, the middle-aged ones at least – were exposed to Swedish fiction in their early youth.

Naturally, when we were first charmed by Astrid Lindgren’s most famous creations, Pippi Longstocking and her chum Kalle Blomqvist, and became engrossed in their adventures, we were too young to give much thought to their personalities or their futures.

Yet Stieg Larsson has penned three amazingly successful books [the second, the Girl who played with Fire was the first Swedish book to reach the top of the British best-seller list] based explicitly on adult versions of the fictional youngsters.

And who could ever have guessed what fate had in store for poor Pippi in the persona of heroine Lisbeth Salander? A diminutive post-punk bisexual tattooed autistic computer hacking genius, Lisbeth – a wild child with a photographic memory and violent tendencies – spends most of this book in hospital.

She has survived a severely abusive father, childhood rape, incarceration in a mental asylum under the control of a sadist, being shot three times and buried alive – now she is targeted by a secret sect within the Swedish Intelligence Service.

Completely bereft of social skills, Lisbeth has few friends and her only family [her father and a newly discovered psychotic half-brother] have tried to murder her: the one person however who would never abandon Pippi is Kalle – aka Lisbeth’s estranged former lover, the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

Now, while a pudgy middle-aged chain-smoking left wing journo with little discernable charm is not your average chick magnet, when the character is the alter ego of the author [Larsson was a pudgy, middle-aged, chain smoking – you get the picture] he has all the pulling power of a fleet of tugs.

To be fair, in between bonking and being taciturn, Mikael does his best to help Lisbeth, a singularly thankless task given her complete lack of social graces, providing her with his own sister as a lawyer, trying to clear her name publically and persuading the police that she is innocent.

With his history as a crusader against the right having made him a target himself, Blomqvist soon begins to suspect there are powerful government forces wanting to silence Salander and to hide the truth about her murderous father, a Russian defector, and his ties to state security.

Since she has already been branded a ‘psychotic lesbian SM Satanist’ their plan is to rig a trial and dupe the pompous prosecutor into having her recommitted to an asylum under the care of their stooge, the amoral psychiatrist who tormented her when she was young.

It’s up to Mikael, his sister the lawyer, and a selection of his sexual partners to save the day not only for Lisbeth but for Swedish security as well by exposing the crooked cabal.

This is the third in what Larsson planned to be a series of ten, and does not work as a stand-alone read – it really is necessary to plough through the 1200 odd pages of the previous two books if you hope to make any sense of Hornet’s Nest.

As it is, it’s impossible to review this book without including a spoiler: Girl who played with Fire ended on a cliff-hanger with Lisbeth having taken an axe to dear old dad after being shot in the hip, shoulder and head then buried. Sorry to spoil the suspense, but she survives…

I found it far too long, far too polemical and far from convincing but I’m on my own in that opinion because critics have labeled it a masterpiece, the most exceptional work in an excellent trilogy. Ironically, Larson died [a workaholic with a dickey heart who smoked 60 cigarettes a day rather than the victim of a right-wing conspiracy] before tasting his success and achieving a level a popularity most writers would kill for.

Stieg Larsson had two favourite children’s writers, Astrid Lindgren and Enid Blyton; Lisbeth and Mikael were his weirdly wacky projections of the relatively straight forward Pippi and Kalle – it’s a great pity he died before giving us his version of Blyton’s more sexually ambiguous characters.

The Famous Five, especially the gender-conflicted George, and the citizens of Toy Town, Noddy and Big Ears in particular, would have made for fascinating reading once Larsson had given them his unique treatment… ( )

Note: No spoilers are contained in this review.

Truly there were moments reading this book when my heart was beating so hard I thought it might jump right out of my chest!

This is Volume 3 of the Millennium Series, published posthumously after the sudden death of the author in November, 2004. Originally, there were to be ten books in this series, and with each book, one mourns more deeply the loss of such a talented writer.

Volume 3 is divided into large sections, and the introduction to each contains a vignette about females who have fought in wars. And that sums up broadly the focus of this book of the series: women warriors. Indeed, it might even be read as a tribute to women and their strengths: sometimes dependent and trusting; brave and resilient when tried; loyal and loving when vindicated.

Like the previous books, the beginning of this one is very complex; I kept a notepad to keep track of the characters. (Similar to the first book in the series and of course, to real life, you don’t know at first who of these myriad people will prove to be important later in the story.) I would hate to try to comprehend what was going on without having had the advantage of reading the other two first.

Even with all the background we have to absorb in the beginning, the suspense and excitement begin right away.

We continue with the same characters as in previous books: Mikael Blovkvist, the crusading journalist who probably served as an alter-ego for the author; Erika Berger, his co-worker and occasional lover; and Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo.

Mikael is obsessed with social justice, “loyal to the point of foolhardiness once he had made someone a friend,” but “completely irresponsible when it comes to relationships.” That is, it never seems to occur to him that a woman could get emotionally involved and become deeply hurt when he moved on to someone else.

Erika has had a relationship with Mikael for twenty-some years, although she remains married to a man she loves. She is a strong, tough editor and is greatly admired by women, grudgingly so by men.

Lisbeth, the undoubted star of the series, is 27, small, slight, and goth-looking, and is being labeled in the press as “a psychopath, a murderer, and a lesbian Satanist.” She has powerful friends who know better - who know that she has been systematically abused and used as a scapegoat - when in fact she is justifiably distrustful, brilliant, resourceful, and admittedly not the sort of person you would want to cross. But her enemies are even more powerful, and include not only actual psychopaths, but a secret section of the Swedish equivalent of the CIA.

The author, through Mikael Blomkvist, has quite a lot to say about violence against women, but he does so through the mechanism of his plot, so you get the message through the horror of the events he relates, rather than through gratuitous chatter by the characters. (Readers should beware, particularly in Volume One of this series, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, of some graphic scenes of abuse.) As Mikael says to his sister in Volume Three:

"When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it’s about violence against women, and the men who enable it.”

And that is the heart and soul of this sensational series.

Evaluation: Each book in the series is better than its predecessor. Volume Three will have you not only racing through its 600 pages, but wishing it didn’t have to end. This is an intelligent, heart-racing, gut-wrenching series of books that shouldn’t be missed!

Note: Unlike the first two books in this series, this volume is not yet available in the U.S. It can be ordered, however, at a discount with no shipping charges from the wonderful U.K. Book Depository. ( )

8 months ago, I posted a review of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. That was the first of a trilogy, and tonight I just finished reading the final part. It was interesting to go back and read my thoughts on the first book and see how they compare to the trilogy as a whole.

Firstly, the final book as an individual novel was thoroughly gripping, and it kept me hooked from start to finish. There were sufficient levels of twistiness, with the requisite sex and violence thrown in for good measure. Try as he might to avoid it, Larsson just can’t help himself from letting his words quickly turn sexy and dirty very quickly.

The characters from the previous two novels stayed true to form, and in a couple of cases were fleshed out much better. The two main protagonists, Blomkvist and Salander (the eponymous anti-heroine) didn’t really develop too much, but they had such rich textures from the preceding pages that this was unnecessary. You knew what to expect from them, and they delivered.

One of the new characters is a fitness-freak policewoman, and it is on her that Larsson seems to get a little carried away with his descriptions. He positively drools over her muscled frame and athletic build, and it struck me as I was reading that this was the second crime/thriller trilogy I’d read in which the author introduces a physically strong female character in the final book.

Thomas Harris did the same trick in Hannibal, with the character Margot. Admittedly, the policewoman here isn’t a full-on bodybuilder like Margot, but repeated reference is made to her muscle tone and the fact that she is stronger than most men. Is it the case that these authors can’t write a more normal female character, or is it that they have a bit of a fetish for this type of woman?

Speaking of fetishisation, it’s pretty clear that Blomkvist is the ideal which Larsson wants to be. Larsson (before his untimely death) was an investigative journalist, just like Blomkvist, and it has to be said that Blomkvist really doesn’t have any negative qualities to his character. He’s dedicated to his work, steadfastly loyal, and an absolute ladies man. It really is a superhero-esque role of sorts.

I can’t really say that there were any characters I actively disliked in terms of their portrayals. Yes, of course there were “baddies”, but they were pretty well-rounded too. In most of them, you could see their dilemmas in deciding to go through with certain actions, and there weren’t too many single-minded cold-blooded individuals.

What can I say about the plot without giving too much away? Well, it very much is an immediate follow-on from The Girl Who Played With Fire, much more so than that was from the first book, and it deals heavily with events in that part of the trilogy. Even 500 pages in, it’s still making huge references to the second book, which is always satisfying when you’ve invested so much time in the characters and plot.

I felt that the resolution of so many plot lines was done very well, and there weren’t really any loose threads by the time I finished reading. And Larsson does an equally good job of keeping you on your toes with a few twists here and there.

Even in the sections where you already know how it’s going to turn out, the writing is of sufficiently high quality to keep you locked in and enjoying it. It’s mostly dialogue which does this task, although his descriptions of the fast-moving action scenes are equally good.

It’s not going to be too long before Hollywood snaps this up, although I understand that a film of the first book has been made in Swedish already. I really hope that the films remain in Sweden, as the country itself is a huge part of the novels, particularly this last one. I can see how certain US institutions and bodies would fulfil similar roles, but it just wouldn’t work overall, I feel.

This trilogy has been criticised as being a bit light, or a bit cheesy, but I have to disagree. These books are nothing like that Dan Brown crap. Yes, they are crime thrillers, but the writing is so much better than Brown’s, and the themes dealt with are much more interesting.

It sounds horrible to say, given that the author died before the trilogy’s publication, but I’m glad that there won’t be a fourth novel in the “trilogy”, as happened with Night Watch. The final novel there was the weakest by a mile, and really left a bit of a sour taste in the mouth, whereas here Larsson has gone out on a high. ( )

Reading this was a bit of a bitter sweet moment, because I knew that Steig Larsson was dead and that this would be the very last Millenium book. In some ways, I didnt want to read it or I wanted to read it slowly so it wouldn't end so soon. I was also a bit nervous that the last book would be a total letdown and would ruin the entire trilogy. After all that procrastinating, I finally got down to the story and realised that it was the perfect ending to a perfect trilogy. Very well written and doesn't disappoint in the slightest. As I said though, the only disappointment is perhaps that there will never be another Lisbeth Salander book again.

This book covers Lisbeth recovering in the hospital from her gunshot wound to the head, which she received in the last book. Meanwhile the prosecutor is preparing his case with the assistance of the Security Police, who are determined to cover up their past mistakes by having Lisbeth committed to a psych ward for life. Blomkvist meanwhile is determined to uncover the conspiracy and save Lisbeth, but this attracts the deadly attention of the Security Police, who realise that Blomkvist needs to be taken out of the picture - permanently.

Erika Berger has left Millenium and is now the editor of Sweden's biggest newspaper where she has to deal with a crazed stalker and some sexual harassment. Blomkvist's sister is now Lisbeth's lawyer and is completely nervous about the whole thing, particularly when your client refuses to speak very much.

The last part of the book is the trial itself and it's pretty obvious what happens but I won't say because I don't want pissed off emails saying I "ruined the ending". But this is definately a book you will stick with right to the very end. The writing is top class and gripping and by the end, you'll be sadly saying goodbye to all your favourite characters. ( )

Sometimes the last of a trilogy fails to deliver.. not this time though!