Book Review: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

The series comes to a close (kind of!) and though I loved it, it also left me feeling divided.

Unless you’ve lived under a rock, at the bottom of a well, in the middle of the desert, you must have heard of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It’s a fantastic crime thriller mystery, probably one of the best ones I’ve ever read (I reviewed it here) and I can honestly say it’s a must-read for probably everyone who reads books, whether you usually like mysteries or not. It’s just so well constructed and fleshed-out, and the mystery itself is incredible intriguing. It was followed by The Girl Who Played With Fire, which I also read, loved and reviewed. What was good about the second book was that it expands on the characters and their relationships, digging into their pasts and forcing us to get to know them better in a way we didn’t in the first book. It’s a very good sequel, though it isn’t as good as the first one, which often is the case.

And there’s this book, the third and last book in the trilogy. (Actually, the series has continued after this one, but the following books were not written by Larsson, since he unfortunately passed in 2004, so I will consider this the original trilogy).

The third book is good. It’s a very well written, a strong, complex thriller, with much of the same vibes as book 1 and 2.

At the same time, I found it quite boring.

The start is good. And the ending is good. I can’t say too much–not anything, really–without spoiling it, and though I really wish I could, I’m not going to, but know that it all comes together in a very satisfying way by the end.

But yeah, the whole middle part is kind of boring. What bored me, is that compared to book 1 and 2 which revolved a lot (almost exclusively, at times) around the characters of Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, book 3 kind of doesn’t feel like it does. The book sees them get caught up in a case so to speak, and then from there on, it’s all about that. Of course Blomkvist and Salander are there for all of it, doing the things they do, trying to figure things out, trying to get to the bottom of things, but it doesn’t feel like it’s something that’s about them. It’s just something they got caught up in while they were living their lives, and it’s just something they have to get through to carry on living their lives.

One problem I had with the middle part, is that the whole big mystery case everyone is caught up in (the one I won’t say more about), seems like a kind of non-issue. People in this book, Blomkvist and Salander included, get mixed up in this huge “scandal”, so to speak, that really doesn’t feel like a scandal at all.

Maybe it’s just me. It probably is–it usually is–but the middle was a slog to get through a lot of the time. Which made me probably pay less attention than I ought to. As a result, I struggled to keep up with a lot of the names, who worked were, and who were involved with who. I got there in the end, but by then it also felt like it didn’t really matter who I thought people were.

Still, don’t get me wrong: this series is fantastic! One of the best crime thrillers you’ll ever read. It probably helps if you read the three books a bit faster than me though, ’cause I realize it’s been three years since I read book 1.

What are you up to these days? Have you read The Millennium Series? Did you like it? Do you agree or disagree with me? Let me know in the comments! And please, if you have any recommendations for future reads, let me know that as well!

As always – please consider checking out my books! If you like crime thriller and psychological horror, and would love to support an indie author (honestly, it means so much) then please, find all my books below!

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