Doug Cornelius .com

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy comes to a grinding halt with the The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. I really enjoyed the cold, dark, Swedish landscape in the first book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The series then turned into an action thriller with The Girl Who Played with Fire. This third book comes across as police and courtroom procedural.

I’m not going to say too much about the book because it would be a spoiler for this book, as well as for the first two books. The character of Lisbeth Salander is fascinating and the highlight of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The rest of the characters are fairly cardboard if not caricatures.

If you liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo then you liked the characters. That book has a clear ending and you can move on with your literary life. If you wonder what happens next with these characters then you will want to read The Girl Who Played with Fire. If you read that book you know that it does not have a clear ending. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is the second half. And it’s the boring half.

The book is largely focused on a trial and investigation leading up to the trial. It comes across as a boring episode of Law Order with Swedish names.

A disappointing third chapter of the trilogy.

If you liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, then you should like this book. Mikael Blomkvist, the intrepid reporter is back.

This time the book is much more focused on the mysterious Lisbeth Salander, the Pippi Longstocking-ish investigator. She is the one who is in trouble as we find out more about her mysterious background.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first book in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy was very cerebral. The Girl Who Played with Fire is action-packed. I have to admit that I was drawn into the story and rabidly consumed the book to see where the story was going.

After reading it and reflecting back, I’m disappointed. The bad guys are cartoonish, reminding me of James Bond villains. Salander is a very interesting character, but seems to have superhero powers. The cops are inept caricatures. Every other character is very flat.

The narrative was compelling and I was intent on finding out what happened to Salander. Maybe that’s enough. I just wish there was more.

That being said, I’m still looking forward to The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest when it comes out next week.

A Swedish crime novel sounds like an odd mix. But apparently Swedish crime novels are taking off.

Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a tale of a complicated international financial fraud and the buried evil past of a wealthy Swedish industrial family.

After reading Mission Flats, I decided to stick with another crime novel. This was a big change moving from the comfy confines of New England in Mission Flats to the stark, cold Swedish landscape in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The central character, Mikael Blomkvist, is a crusading financial journalist who has fallen into disgrace by publishing an untrue story about a titan of industry. His eventual sidekick is a prodigy with superior computer hacking, serious trust issues and a dragon tattoo on her left shoulder blade.

In the town of Hedestad, a village three hours north of Stockholm, an 82-year-old Henrik Vanger wants to offer him a job. He wants him to solve a 40-year-old mystery: What happened to Harriet Vanger, the daughter of Vanger’s pro-Nazi brother, Richard? Harriet was just 16 when she disappeared, and despite a lengthy investigation no trace of her was found. But every year on the anniversary of her disappearance unusual flowers are delivered to Vanger.

I found the Swedish names very alien in the text. Other than Ikea, I am not used to running into the language and its places. I also found the combination of financial journalism and a murder investigation to be an odd combination. It worked, but it seemed odd to me at times.

In its original Swedish it won Sweden’s Glass Key Award in 2006 for best crime novel of the year, and won the 2008 Boeke Prize. Larsson was posthumously awarded the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for International Author of the Year in 2008. Larsson died at the age of 50 of a massive heart attack in 2004.

The book is first part of in Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy”. The title character with the tattoo appears in the second part The Girl Who Played with Fire. At least according to the excerpt in the back of the book.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is worth reading if you are looking for a good crime novel.