The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest

I was excited to get a package the other day and find that Alfred A. Knopf had sent me an advance copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson, the third thriller in his series that begins with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and continues with The Girl Who Played With Fire.

It begins almost at the exact moment that the second book ended, with Lisbeth Salander being taken to an emergency room to have her injuries--from being shot in the head and buried alive--treated. As she starts to heal up (yes, she lives), Mikael Blomkvist starts to unravel the complicated legal knots she's been tangled in all her life.

I found the whole story exciting, fairly fast-paced (at least for these characteristically slow-moving Scandinavian mysteries), and deeply satisfying in terms of providing an ending for all the major themes set up in the first two lengthy books.

The stakes in this one are higher, too:
"Somebody must have made that decision. It simply could not have been the government. Ingvar Carlsson had been prime minister at the time, and then Carl Bildt. But no politician would dare to be involved in such a decision, which contradicted all law and justice and which would result in a disastrous scandal if it were ever discovered.
If the government was involved, then Sweden wasn't one iota better than any dictatorship in the entire world."
As it turns out, there is indeed a "disastrous scandal," the bad guys are caught, and the good guys win. Salander finally goes on trial and, with the help of her friends, is able to prove that every one of the claims she's been making her whole life long is absolutely and incontrovertibly true.

As if all that satisfaction weren't enough, the book ends with Lisbeth getting some grisly revenge against her brutish half-brother, who ends up in an abandoned factory with "his feet...nailed solidly to the newly laid plank floor." She considers killing him:
"she saw no reason to let him live any longer. He hated her with a passion that she could not even fathom. What would happen if she turned him over to the police? A trial? A life sentence? When would he be granted parole? How soon would he escape?...How many years would she have to look over her shoulder, waiting for the day when her brother would suddenly turn up again?"
....But murder? Was it worth it? What would happen to her if she killed him? What were the odds that she would avoid discovery? What would she be ready to sacrifice for the satisfaction of firing the nail gun one last time?"
And then finally Lisbeth Salander, a character heretofore without the least particle of social conscience, thinks back to one of the revelations of the mystery in the first book and realizes that "she had the legal right of a citizen and was socially responsible for her actions." So she takes care of her brother in what could, with a stretch of the imagination, be considered a socially responsible manner, helping the police catch a few more criminals along the way.

This book will be available in the U.S. (translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland) on May 27, 2010. If you've read the first two, you already know you want to read it. If you haven't read those first two yet, you have time now--and then you won't have much of a wait for the conclusion to this enormously complicated and entertaining story.

The Girl Who Played With Fire Giveaway Winner

Today's winner of the hardback copy of Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire, provided by AA Knopf, was chosen by Research Randomizer.

And the winner is... (drum roll)
Belle of Ms. Bookish

Belle gets the book, but Knopf was also kind enough to send me 28 dragon tattoos (it's as if they counted my giveaway entrants, isn't it?), so all of you who entered should send me your mailing address at Jeanne dot Griggs at gmail dot com and I will mail you your very own dragon tattoo as a consolation prize. Moreover, I will be happy to publish a follow-up post with any photos you send me of you actually wearing the tattoo!

The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Girl Who Played With Fire is the second book in Stieg Larsson's Millenium series, and it's just as good as the first one (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). In some ways it's better, because we already know and care about some of the characters, Lisbeth Salander in particular--the final half of the book is partly driven by the reader's urge to find out what the mystery will reveal about Lisbeth and what happened to her when she was twelve.

The main mystery is who murdered the author of a book about sexual trafficking and his wife, whose graduate thesis provided the basis for the book. Lisbeth's fingerprints are on the murder weapon, so the police launch a massive manhunt for her, and Mikael Blomkvist sets out to prove her innocence.

There are some real surprises in the last half of the novel, showing me how far from formulaic this mystery is. The title is surprisingly apt, in the end, although you won't know just how apt until you get there.

This novel will be released in the U.S. in July 2009, although it's already available in English from the U.K. I got to read an advance copy, courtesy of the kind manager at the Kenyon College bookstore. And now I have a long wait for the third one, which will not be available in English until 2010.

But I don't regret having read the first two, even though I have to wait. It's like when I saved one of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries for a while, so I still had one to look forward to. These two novels rank among the best mystery novels I've ever read. If you like mysteries at all, you will want to read these. You can get the first one today. What are you waiting for?

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

When I started reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I thought it was going to be a mystery about a bad-guy financier who gets investigated by the hero of the novel. Well, in the end it was that, and more, but in the meantime, I got caught up in the story of the girl with the aforementioned tattoo and the man who lost his job because he started investigating the bad-guy financier, and then I detoured so thoroughly into the story of how the man who lost his job, Mikhael Blomkvist, solved the mystery of a young girl's disappearance that I was surprised, when that mystery was solved, to find that the book was far from over.

In the end, I got the downfall of the bad-guy financier, the triumph of the girl with the tattoo, some insight into the complicated denouement of all the mysteries Mikhael was investigating, and three happy endings. That's not enough, though; the girl with the tattoo gets one happy ending and also one unhappy ending, which finally ends the novel.

This is one of the most complicated and interesting mystery plots I've tried to follow for a very long time. The girl with the tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, is a girl with a mysterious past and absolutely without pity:

"'Talk about a dysfunctional family,' Blomkvist said. 'Martin really didn't have a chance.'
Salander gave him a strange look.
'What Martin told me--even though it was rambling--was that his father started his apprenticeship after he reached puberty. He was there at the murder of Lea in Uddevalla in 1962. He was fourteen, for God's sake. He was there at the murder of Sara in 1964 and that time he took an active part. He was sixteen.'
'And?'
'He said that he had never touched another man--except his father. That made me think that...well, the only possible conclusion is that his father raped him. Martin called it 'his duty.' The sexual assaults must have gone on for a long time. He was raised by his father, so to speak.'
'Bullshit,' Salander said, her voice hard as flint.
Blomkvist stared at her in astonishment. She had a stubborn look in her eyes. There was not an ounce of sympathy in it.
'Martin had exactly the same opportunity as anyone else to strike back. He killed and he raped because he liked doing it.'
'I'm not saying otherwise. But Martin was a repressed boy and under the influence of his father, just as Gottfried was cowed by his father, the Nazi.'
'So you're assuming that Martin had no will of his own and that people become whatever they've been brought up to be.'
Blomkvist smiled cautiously. 'Is this a sensitive issue?'
Salander's eyes blazed with fury. Blomkvist quickly went on.
'I'm only saying that I think that a person's upbringing does play a role. Gottfried's father beat him mercilessly for years. That leaves its mark.'
'Bullshit,' Salander said again. 'Gottfried isn't the only kid who was ever mistreated. That doesn't give him the right to murder women. He made that choice himself. And the same is true of Martin.'"

Now, even though The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo gave me more story than I can usually ask for in one novel, I'm still wild to know more about what made Salander the person she is, and to see what she'll do next. Fortunately for me, this novel by Stieg Larsson is the first in his "Millennium Trilogy". At the time of his death in November 2004 he left three unpublished novels, and the next one is The Girl Who Played With Fire, which will be published in English this July. Since I've already started reading an advance copy from my local college bookstore, you can look for that review soon.

Today, however, is my last day of being underemployed. Next week is the kids' spring break, and we have plans to break out of our routine, which will result in less blogging for a few days. And then I start commuting and teaching again. Have I finished all the projects I started because I thought I had so much time? Um, what do you think? Do you know anyone who is that neat and organized? I don't think I do!