The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest (original Swedish title is Luftslottet som sprängdes or The Air Castle That Blew Up) is the third, and final, book in the Millennium Trilogy by the late Steig Larsson.  It picks up immediately after the events previous installment, The Girl Who Played With Fire, so if you didn’t read that one you’ll be pretty lost to say the least, whereas you could have read The Girl Who Played With Fire without reading the first book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  I can’t say much about the plot of this one without spoiling much of the previous book.  This book does contain the familiar theme of the trilogy of women being abused and mistreated by society and finds Lisbeth Salander fighting for her life and to clear her name.

I was a huge fan of Dragon Tattoo but I found Fire to be a letdown.  It totally was just a very different book and didn’t contain a lot of what I loved so much about Dragon Tattoo.  However Fire gets redeemed slightly with this book as it is basically a very long lead up to the events here.  Once again we find ourselves changing genres.  Dragon Tattoo was a suspenseful mystery, Fire was more a police procedural almost, and Hornet’s Nest brings us into a spy game.  Yep that’s right.  This one is heavily about spies.  Although it might seem silly, it was actually pretty enjoyable.  There’s even a little bit of suspense brought back into the series here, mainly in the early chapters that take place in the hospital.

Once again you find yourself dealing with a lot of characters.  You have the main Millennium staff and Milton Security as well as a good 95% of the characters from Fire and then there’s a whole new group of characters introduced here.  So there is a lot to keep track of.  There’s also a lot to keep track of as parts of this book deal heavily with Swedish history and politics of which I certainly have no prior knowledge of, and I don’t think most non-Swedes probably do.  There is a little appendix at the very back of the book that explains some of these events, which I rather appreciated but unfortunately didn’t realize was there until I reached the very back of the book and was well past those parts.  Still it was a nice touch.

Once again Reg Keeland’s translation seems to be excellent, with the warning that I speak no swedish and have never read the original so I cannot speak to how exact it is, but the writing flows well and seems like it very well could have been written in english.

Basically if you read Fire, you owe it to yourself to finish off the saga with this one.  I promise you it’s better and more fulfilling and besides you get to spend more time with these great characters.  I actually really found myself wishing there was another book here so that I could go on another adventure with these characters (hopefully more in the Dragon Tattoo vein of things), and I very much wish that author Steig Larsson was still alive (he died in 2004 right after delivering the manuscripts for all 3 books) to bring us even something with completely different characters.  He was a talent and I will miss him especially when you think of what he could have delivered were he alive today.

This book has been published everywhere in the world (it’s already a film in Sweden) except the US where it comes out on May 25th.  You can pre-order it through Amazon using the link below or get the the unabridged audiobook from Audiblewhich is already out. Also on Audible are audiobook versions of The Girl Who Played With Fire and the highly recommended The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Also available on May 25th is a collection of all three books of The Millennium Trilogy
Or you can buy the other two individually using these links for a lot less: