I had a love/hate relationship with this series from the very beginning. Not more than 100 pages in and I e-mailed my equally bookish friend: "Have you read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? It's so awful! I'm about 100 pages in and all they've talked about is the state of the Swedish economy!" She e-mailed back: "LOVE those books, especially the third; it was my favorite. Salander is my hero." With that recommendation and a rabid curiosity to find out what on earth a Swedish Ponzi scheme had to do with a girl gone missing more than 40 years ago, I pressed on.
The first book was the final push to be put on antidepressants, and I had to be book-mailed into reading the second (I had to read that, she had to read Marley and Me). But with the abrupt ending of The Girl Who Played with Fire, there really was no question of continuing on to The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.
Picking up where the second left off, we're with Salandar after she's been shot in the head, buried alive, and somehow managed to survive it all. Blomkvist, the scrappy journalist who just always manages to show up at the right place at the right time, has done what do one else seems capable of doing: figuring out what happened.
He found Lisbeth is the nick of time and she spends most of this book looked in the hospital. Complicating matters is that her psychopathic father - consequently, the one who helped shoot and bury her - is locked in the same hospital after receiving a blow to the face with an ax. So, my first question is, how on earth are these people surviving this stuff? For the most part, these books are a little more reality than I'm equipped to handle, until we get to the violence and then it's like everyone turns into Batman.
Despite being a complete lunatic, Salander's father presses charges, in addition to the one's she's already facing, so now she must be put on trial. Which means the secrets she's kept for so long are all about to come out.
As we know, Salandar has an aversion to authority and has a bad habit of refusing most of the help she's offered. But unless she finally breaks down and tells her story, her case has too many holes to clear her name. So with the help of a plucky young doctor and a janitor who knows a little too much about Iraqi authority, Salandar tells her story.
In spite of my reservations concerning the story, my heart was pounding through the entire book. It's very cat-and-mouse, and who's brain is faster than the other? And it is sometimes comical with the abundance of investigators snooping around Sweden.
It doesn't keep you guessing, most of the characters are already doing that anyway, but it does keep you wanting more. This book - well, the story as a whole - also has the potential to create more conspiracy theorists. As a citizen, I can read a news story about a liquor store hold-up and not believe anything different, but what if it really *is* some big government scam?
More than anything, I applaud the author, Stieg Larsson, who is able to interweave story and characters so magnificent it makes the head spin. I constantly found myself thinking, where does he come up with this stuff??
On an unrelated note, mostly because I don't understand what the Amazon excerpts have to do with the story besides making you think of something else for a moment, this book interested me in Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women's Regiment of Dahomey. I wasn't aware that such little was known about Amazons, and that most of it was considered legend or untrue.
As always, I recommend reading Larsson's series before seeing the movies. It's an incredibly enthralling story with many different pieces that fit together just so. It shows you the good guys and the bad guys, but that there are usually more good guys.
