A review by shawntowner
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

5.0

Maybe it's the reviews I've read and the Stieg Larsson is an unprofessional writer and his novels are inexplicably popular pulp trash narrative that much of the Internets has seem to have adopted, or maybe it's the fact that I recently read Moby Dick, but I did notice more digressions of a political and historical nature in Hornet's Nest, as compared to the other books in the Millenium trilogy. These digressions do slow things down at times in the first third or so of the book, but the majority of the novel succeeds in making investigative magazine journalism seem like an exciting form of superhero crime-fighting. Much of this is due to the larger cast of characters and increased roles for ancillary characters from the previous novels. Larsson is able to bounce the telling of his story between multiple focal points, making a 600-page novel fly by like a pulp novella. The last quarter of the book, which deals with Salander's court case, is phenomenal. It was impossible to put down, and not just in a cliched book jacket blurb way. I should have been cooking a frozen pizza and fixing my injured pool robot, but I couldn't stop reading. Stieg Larsson might not be able of crafting Nabokovian prose, but he writes a helluva good novel.