The girl who kicked the hornets' nest

Review by New York Times Review

If you're a latecomer to the Stieg Larsson phenomenon, here, briefly, is the deal: Larsson was a Swedish journalist who edited a magazine called Expo, which was devoted to exposing racist and extremist organizations in his native land. In his spare time, he worked on a trilogy of crime thrillers, delivering them to his Swedish publisher in 2004. In November of that year, a few months before the first of these novels came out, he died of a heart attack. He was only 50, and he never got to see his books become enormous best sellers - first in Sweden and then, in translation, all over the globe. "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" is the third installment of the trilogy; its predecessors, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and "The Girl Who Played With Fire," have already sold a million copies combined in the United States and many times that abroad. All three books are centered on two principal characters: a fearless middle-aged journalist named Mikael Blomkvist, who publishes an Expo-like magazine called Millennium, and a slight, sullen, socially maladjusted, tech-savvy young goth named Lisbeth Salander, the "girl" of the books' titles, who, in addition to her dragon tattoo, possesses extraordinary hacking abilities and a twisted, complicated past. Together, Blomkvist and Salander use their wiles and skills to take on corporate corruptos, government sleazes and sex criminals, not to mention these miscreants' attendant hired goons. THIS all might sound rather Eurocheesy, a bit Jean-Claude Van Damme, but it's not. Larsson was a cerebral, high-minded activist and self-proclaimed feminist who happened to have a God-given gift for pulse-racing narrative. It's this offbeat combination of attributes - imagine if John Grisham had prefaced his writing career not by practicing law in Mississippi but by heading up the Stockholm office of Amnesty International - that has made the series such a sui generis smash. Larsson's is a dark, nearly humorless world, where everyone works fervidly into the night and swills tons of coffee; hardly a page goes by without someone "switching on the coffee machine," ordering "coffee and a sandwich" or responding affirmatively to the offer "Coffee?" But this world is not dystopian. The good guys (or, I should say, the morally righteous people of all genders) always prevail in the end. The books, translated by Reg Keeland, are not lightweight in any sense - their combined bulk, at upward of 500 pages apiece, will strain the biceps of even the most Bunyanesque U.P.S. deliveryman - but they're extraordinarily fleet of movement and utterly addicting. The first in the series, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," is an especially artful construction, its thriller intrigue enrobed in a Dominick Dunne-style screwy-rich-people tale. When we meet Blomkvist, his professional reputation has been momentarily blotted by a libel verdict against him, and he has grudgingly accepted a private assignment from an elderly, wealthy industrialist named Henrik Vanger: to crack the unsolved mystery of Vanger's favorite great-niece's disappearance some 40 years earlier. Vanger's people have taken the precaution of ordering a background check on Blomkvist, hiring a security firm that sics its most ruthless researcher, Salander, on him. It's not until halfway through the story that Blomkvist learns of his vetting and his minxlike vetter, but when he does, he seeks out Salander to be his partner in the vanished-niece investigation, and, lo, Larsson's dynamic duo is born. This being Sweden, they also indulge in the occasional bout of casual sex. If you haven't read "Dragon Tattoo," I recommend that you forgo the remainder of this review and plunge into it headlong, both because you'll enjoy yourself and because, as the kids say, spoilers lie ahead. With each sequel, Larsson simply picked up where he had left off, so it's tough to discuss the final volume of the series without acknowledging some of the big reveals of its predecessors. The second book, "The Girl Who Played With Fire," is something of a comedown. Book 1 has a wintry elegance to it, as the investigation compels Blomkvist (and, later, Salander) to move up north from Stockholm to the Vanger family's remote island compound, a bleakly beautiful place dotted with houses inhabited by relatives who distrust one another. The dysfunctional Vangers are one of Larsson's better inventions: their alliances and schisms are perfectly observed; the psychic damage wrought by their privileged life is all too authentic. But Book 2 is more cartoonish. Unmoored from the Vangers, Larsson relies more on implausible villains, far-fetched coincidences and unsurvivable-in-real-life episodes of violence. This doesn't stop "Played With Fire" from being entertaining, but it's silly and over the top. Blomkvist is back on the job at Millennium, and we are forced to swallow the facts that (a) the sinister, shadowy sex trafficker his magazine is hot on the trail of, Alexander Zalachenko, just so happens to be Salander's father, and a former Soviet spy to boot; (b) Zalachenko's chief henchman, a big galoot named Ronald Niedermann, is afflicted/blessed with a rare defect called congenital analgesia, which makes him impervious to physical pain; (c) Zalachenko manages to frame Salander as the prime suspect in a series of murders committed by Niedermann; and (d) Salander, in a climactic confrontation with Zalachenko and Niedermann, survives being shot and buried alive by them, then uses her cigarette case to claw out of her grave and then manages, despite having grievous physical injuries and a bullet lodged in her brain, to swing an ax into her father's head - though he, too, somehow doesn't die. Book 3, gratifyingly, brings the action back to a place somewhat resembling reality and, in so doing, restores dignity to the franchise. It begins with both Salander and Zalachenko in the hospital in critical condition, and Blomkvist on the case to exonerate the one and finger the other. The possibility that Zalachenko will be exposed to public scrutiny introduces a clever new wrinkle: the reactivation of some retired Swedish cold warriors whose responsibility it was, during the Soviet era, to harbor, handle and re-ID Zalachenko after he defected to Sweden in the mid-1970s. These old spies don't want their cover blown, or that of the ultrasecret unit of the Security Police for which they worked, the Section for Special Analysis. So Salander and Blomkvist are presented with yet another adversary, this one from within the depths of the very government that should be protecting them. It's all skillfully interlaced: the turf wars between the police and intelligence agencies; the back story and continuing skulduggery of the Section; the dogged shoe-leather journalism of Blomkvist and the Millennium staff; and Salander's impressive ability to marshal the forces of her hacker peers from her hospital bed. And for fans of the first two books, there are plenty of the Larssonian hallmarks they have come to love: the rough justice meted out by Salander to her enemies; the strong, successful female characters, like Blomkvist's lawyer sister, Annika Giannini, and Millennium's editor in chief, Erika Berger; and the characters' acutely Swedish, acutely relaxed attitude toward sex and sexuality. Berger and Blomkvist are occasional lovers, and have been since Book 1, despite her being married and his irrepressible penchant for tomcatting. It's all cool: their dalliance has the blessing of her husband, Greger, who sometimes sleeps with men. As Larsson writes about Berger: "In the early '90s . . . she and Greger had been guests of the glass artist Torkel Bollinger at his villa on the Costa del Sol. During the vacation Berger had discovered that her husband had a definite bisexual tendency, and they had both ended up in bed with Torkel. It had been a pretty wonderful vacation." There are moments in "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," as there are in the two earlier books, in which Larsson the pamphleteer gets the better of Larsson the novelist. The original Swedish title of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is "Man Som Hatar Kvinnor," or "Men Who Hate Women," and this sort of ham-handed didacticism at times interferes with Larsson's natural storytelling ability. Near the end of Book 3, Blomkvist is actually made to speak the words "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." Save it for the study guide, Stieg! Likewise, Berger is assigned a subplot - in which she takes a new job as editor of a major newspaper and acquires a stalker who leaves notes that address her as "whore" - that has no bearing whatsoever on the main story, and seems to exist only to demonstrate how down Larsson is with all the oppressed ladies in the house. BUT these transparently "activist" moments are forgivable, as is the pathological coffee drinking, a tic that recurs so relentlessly that I don't think Larsson realized it was a tic. A thought on this subject: Many of the Larsson faithful subscribe to a belief that the author's premature death was not of natural causes. He had been threatened in real life by skinheads and neo-Nazis; ergo, the theories go, he was made dead by the very sorts of heavies who crop up in his novels. But such talk has been emphatically dismissed by Larsson's intimates. So let me advance my own theory: Coffee killed him. If we accept that Blomkvist is, in many respects, a romanticized version of Larsson, and that Blomkvist's habits reflected the author's own, Larsson overcaffeinated himself to death. Of course, the cigarettes and junk food to which both men are/were partial couldn't have helped, either. In any event, it's sad that Larsson died, and that "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" is the last book he finished. I'm not surprised at the reports that many American readers, suspended in mid-momentum by the ambiguous ending of Book 2, sprang for pricey imports of the British edition of Book 3 instead of awaiting its publication here. Reading Stieg Larsson produces a kind of rush -rather like a strong cup of coffee. These best-selling Swedish thrillers feature nasty men, strong women and an acutely relaxed attitude toward sex. David Kamp, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, is the author of "The United States of Arugula."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 23, 2010]

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Simon Vance isn't about to change anything that worked so well in his renditions of the first two-thirds of the Millennium trilogy. But as the late author planned, the books form a coming-of-age story, albeit an unconventional one, in which the rough-edged computer genius Lisbeth Salander moves from aggressively antisocial behavior toward self-awareness and happiness. Much of that happens in this book, and Vance follows Larsson's lead, subtly decreasing Salander's stridency, even as she is forced to combat an awesome array of villains. Vance has no problem vocally distinguishing each of the bad guys, along with the heroic team of police and journalists led by Salander's co-protagonist, magazine writer Mikael Blomkvist. He even manages to help listeners identify a Stockholm telephone directory's worth of Swedish names. Vance wrings every ounce of suspense out of the prose, and there is one shocking confrontation near the end that allows him to pull out all the stops. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 21). (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

This final entry in Larsson's posthumously published "Millennium" trilogy follows the LJ Best Audio of 2009 The Girl Who Played with Fire, also available from Books on Tape/Random Audio. It features a critically wounded Lisbeth Salander working alongside friend and journalist Mikael Blomkvist to prove her innocence and plot her revenge, and it successfully pulls together all the earlier plot lines while also developing new narrative threads. Narrator Simon Vance (see Behind the Mike, LJ 11/15/08) handles the complex plot and diverse characters well, helping the story to move along quickly and addictively. Highly recommended as an essential purchase to complete the series, all three of whose entries were LJ Best Sellers. ["A must" for Larsson fans, read the review of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Knopf hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 5/21/10.-Ed.]-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

chapter 1 Friday, April 8 Dr. Jonasson was woken by a nurse five minutes before the helicopter was expected to land. It was just before 1:30 in the morning. "What?" he said, confused. "Rescue Service helicopter coming in. Two patients. An injured man and a younger woman. The woman has gunshot wounds." "All right," Jonasson said wearily. Although he had slept for only half an hour, he felt groggy. He was on the night shift in the ER at Sahlgrenska hospital in Göteborg. It had been a strenuous evening. By 12:30 the steady flow of emergency cases had eased off. He had made a round to check on the state of his patients and then gone back to the staff bedroom to try to rest for a while. He was on duty until 6:00, and seldom got the chance to sleep even if no emergency patients came in. But this time he had fallen asleep almost as soon as he turned out the light. Jonasson saw lightning out over the sea. He knew that the helicopter was coming in the nick of time. All of a sudden a heavy downpour lashed at the window. The storm had moved in over Göteborg. He heard the sound of the chopper and watched as it banked through the storm squalls down towards the helipad. For a second he held his breath when the pilot seemed to have difficulty controlling the aircraft. Then it vanished from his field of vision and he heard the engine slowing to land. He took a hasty swallow of his tea and set down the cup. Jonasson met the emergency team in the admissions area. The other doctor on duty took on the first patient who was wheeled in-an elderly man with his head bandaged, apparently with a serious wound to the face. Jonasson was left with the second patient, the woman who had been shot. He did a quick visual examination: it looked like she was a teenager, very dirty and bloody, and severely wounded. He lifted the blanket that the Rescue Service had wrapped around her body and saw that the wounds to her hip and shoulder were bandaged with duct tape, which he considered a pretty clever idea. The tape kept bacteria out and blood in. One bullet had entered her hip and gone straight through the muscle tissue. He gently raised her shoulder and located the entry wound in her back. There was no exit wound: the round was still inside her shoulder. He hoped it had not penetrated her lung, and since he did not see any blood in the woman's mouth he concluded that probably it had not. "Radiology," he told the nurse in attendance. That was all he needed to say. Then he cut away the bandage that the emergency team had wrapped around her skull. He froze when he saw another entry wound. The woman had been shot in the head, and there was no exit wound there either. Jonasson paused for a second, looking down at the girl. He felt dejected. He often described his job as being like that of a goalkeeper. Every day people came to his place of work in varying conditions but with one objective: to get help. Jonasson was the goalkeeper who stood between the patient and Fonus Funeral Service. His job was to decide what to do. If he made the wrong decision, the patient might die or perhaps wake up disabled for life. Most often he made the right decision, because the vast majority of injured people had an obvious and specific problem. A stab wound to the lung or a crushing injury after a car crash were both particular and recognizable problems that could be dealt with. The survival of the patient depended on the extent of the damage and on Jonasson's skill. There were two kinds of injury that he hated. One was a serious burn case, because no matter what measures he took the burns would almost inevitably result in a lifetime of suffering. The second was an injury to the brain. The girl on the gurney could live with a piece of lead in her hip and a piece of lead in her shoulder. But a piece of lead inside her brain was a trauma of a wholly different magnitude. He was suddenly aware of the nurse saying something. "Sorry. I wasn't listening." "It's her." "What do you mean?" "It's Lisbeth Salander. The girl they've been hunting for the past few weeks, for the triple murder in Stockholm." Jonasson looked again at the unconscious patient's face. He realized at once that the nurse was right. He and the whole of Sweden had seen Salander's passport photograph on billboards outside every newspaper kiosk for weeks. And now the murderer herself had been shot, which was surely poetic justice of a sort. But that was not his concern. His job was to save his patient's life, irrespective of whether she was a triple murderer or a Nobel Prize winner. Or both. Then the efficient chaos, the same in every ER the world over, erupted. The staff on Jonasson's shift set about their appointed tasks. Salander's clothes were cut away. A nurse reported on her blood pressure-100/70-while the doctor put his stethoscope to her chest and listened to her heartbeat. It was surprisingly regular, but her breathing was not quite normal. Jonasson did not hesitate to classify Salander's condition as critical. The wounds in her shoulder and hip could wait until later, with a compress on each, or even with the duct tape that some inspired soul had applied. What mattered was her head. Jonasson ordered tomography with the new and improved CT scanner that the hospital had lately acquired. Jonasson had a view of medicine that was at times unorthodox. He thought doctors often drew conclusions that they could not substantiate. This meant that they gave up far too easily; alternatively, they spent too much time at the acute stage trying to work out exactly what was wrong with the patient so as to decide on the right treatment. This was correct procedure, of course. The problem was that the patient was in danger of dying while the doctor was still doing his thinking. But Jonasson had never before had a patient with a bullet in her skull. Most likely he would need a brain surgeon. He had all the theoretical knowledge required to make an incursion into the brain, but he did not by any means consider himself a brain surgeon. He felt inadequate, but all of a sudden he realized that he might be luckier than he deserved. Before he scrubbed up and put on his operating clothes he sent for the nurse. "There's an American professor from Boston working at the Karolinska hospital in Stockholm. He happens to be in Göteborg tonight, staying at the Elite Park Avenue on Avenyn. He just gave a lecture on brain research. He's a good friend of mine. Could you get the number?" While Jonasson was still waiting for the X-rays, the nurse came back with the number of the Elite Park Avenue. Jonasson picked up the phone. The night porter at the Elite Park Avenue was very reluctant to wake a guest at that time of night and Jonasson had to come up with a few choice phrases about the critical nature of the situation before his call was put through. "Good morning, Frank," Jonasson said when the call was finally answered. "It's Anders. Do you feel like coming over to Sahlgrenska to help out in a brain op?" "Are you bullshitting me?" Dr. Frank Ellis had lived in Sweden for many years and was fluent in Swedish-albeit with an American accent- but when Jonasson spoke to him in Swedish, Ellis always replied in his mother tongue. "The patient is in her mid-twenties. Entry wound, no exit." "And she's alive?" "Weak but regular pulse, less regular breathing, blood pressure one hundred over seventy. She also has a bullet wound in her shoulder and another in her hip. But I know how to handle those two." "Sounds promising," Ellis said. "Promising?" "If somebody has a bullet in their head and they're still alive, that points to hopeful." "I understand. . . . Frank, can you help me out?" "I spent the evening in the company of good friends, Anders. I got to bed at 1:00 and no doubt I have an impressive blood alcohol content." "I'll make the decisions and do the surgery. But I need somebody to tell me if I'm doing anything stupid. Even a falling-down drunk Professor Ellis is several classes better than I could ever be when it comes to assessing brain damage." "OK, I'll come. But you're going to owe me one." "I'll have a taxi waiting outside by the time you get down to the lobby. The driver will know where to drop you, and a nurse will be there to meet you and get you scrubbed in." "I had a patient a number of years ago, in Boston-I wrote about the case in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was a girl the same age as your patient here. She was walking to the university when someone shot her with a crossbow. The arrow entered at the outside edge of her left eyebrow and went straight through her head, exiting from almost the middle of the back of her neck." "And she survived?" "She looked like nothing on earth when she came in. We cut off the arrow shaft and put her head in a CT scanner. The arrow went straight through her brain. By all known reckoning she should have been dead, or at least suffered such massive trauma that she would have been in a coma." "And what was her condition?" "She was conscious the whole time. Not only that; she was terribly frightened, of course, but she was completely rational. Her only problem was that she had an arrow through her skull." "What did you do?" "Well, I got the forceps and pulled out the arrow and bandaged the wounds. More or less." "And she lived to tell the tale?" "Obviously her condition was critical, but the fact is we could have sent her home the same day. I've seldom had a healthier patient." Jonasson wondered whether Ellis was pulling his leg. "On the other hand," Ellis went on, "I had a forty-two-year-old patient in Stockholm some years ago who banged his head on a windowsill. He began to feel sick immediately and was taken by ambulance to the ER. When I got to him he was unconscious. He had a small bump and a very slight bruise. But he never regained consciousness and died after nine days in intensive care. To this day I have no idea why he died. In the autopsy report, we wrote brain haemorrhage resulting from an accident, but not one of us was satisfied with that assessment. The bleeding was so minor, and located in an area that shouldn't have affected anything else at all. And yet his liver, kidneys, heart, and lungs shut down one after the other. The older I get, the more I think it's like a game of roulette. I don't believe we'll ever figure out precisely how the brain works." He tapped on the X-ray with a pen. "What do you intend to do?" "I was hoping you would tell me." "Let's hear your diagnosis." "Well, first of all, it seems to be a small-calibre bullet. It entered at the temple, and then stopped about four centimetres into the brain. It's resting against the lateral ventricle. There's bleeding there." "How will you proceed?" "To use your terminology, get some forceps and extract the bullet by the same route it went in." "Excellent idea. I would use the thinnest forceps you have." "It's that simple?" "What else can we do in this case? We could leave the bullet where it is, and she might live to be a hundred, but it's also a risk. She might develop epilepsy, migraines, all sorts of complaints. And one thing you really don't want to do is drill into her skull and then operate a year from now when the wound itself has healed. The bullet is located away from the major blood vessels. So I would recommend that you extract it, but . . ." "But what?" "The bullet doesn't worry me so much. She's survived this far and that's a good omen for her getting through having the bullet removed too. The real problem is here." He pointed at the X-ray. "Around the entry wound you have all sorts of bone fragments. I can see at least a dozen that are a couple of millimetres long. Some are embedded in the brain tissue. That's what could kill her if you're not careful." "Isn't that part of the brain associated with numbers and mathematical capacity?" Jonasson said. Ellis shrugged. "Mumbo jumbo. I have no idea what these particular grey cells are for. You can only do your best. You operate. I'll look over your shoulder." Mikael Blomkvist looked up at the clock and saw that it was just after 3:00 in the morning. He was handcuffed and increasingly uncomfortable. He closed his eyes for a moment. He was dead tired but running on adrenaline. He opened them again and gave the policeman an angry glare. Inspector Thomas Paulsson had a shocked expression on his face. They were sitting at a kitchen table in a white farmhouse called Gosseberga, somewhere near Nossebro. Blomkvist had heard of the place for the first time less than twelve hours earlier. There was no denying the disaster that had occurred. "Imbecile," Blomkvist said. "Now, you listen here-" "Imbecile," Blomkvist said again. "I warned you he was dangerous, for Christ's sake. I told you that you would have to handle him like a live grenade. He's murdered at least three people with his bare hands and he's built like a tank. And you send a couple of village policemen to arrest him as if he were some Saturday night drunk." Blomkvist shut his eyes again, wondering what else could go wrong that night. He had found Lisbeth Salander just after midnight. She was very badly wounded. He had sent for the police and the Rescue Service. The only thing that had gone right was that he had persuaded them to send a helicopter to take the girl to Sahlgrenska hospital. He had given them a clear description of her injuries and the bullet wound in her head, and some bright spark at the Rescue Service got the message. Even so, it had taken over half an hour for the Puma from the helicopter unit in Säve to arrive at the farmhouse. Blomkvist had gotten two cars out of the barn. He switched on their headlights to illuminate a landing area in the field in front of the house. The helicopter crew and two paramedics had proceeded in a routine and professional manner. One of the medics tended to Salander while the other took care of Alexander Zalachenko, known locally as Karl Axel Bodin. Zalachenko was Salander's father and her worst enemy. He had tried to kill her, but he had failed. Blomkvist had found him in the woodshed at the farm with a nasty-looking gash-probably from an axe- in his face and some shattering damage to one of his legs which Blomkvist did not bother to investigate. From the Paperback edition. Excerpted from The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---