Kickboxed set
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Just a few more pages before I nod off. And before I knew it, the end was reachable. And achieved.
Wow! What a textbook – three textbooks in fact – of how to write a thriller. This is not Dan Brown’s exaggerated style, cheap but effective. This is the real deal. A good story, larger than life characters, exquisitely plotted in exotic locations with forensic detail.
The book pulls you up on its back and gallops away with you.
And then flies away up into the air. Pegasus carries you on and you hold on tight until the last page is turned and you are back on solid earth again.
The conclusion to the trilogy, and though it stands up on its own, it really helps if you have read the preceding two in the series. To help get the locations and especially the characters straight. There’s a blizzard of both in this book.
After the almost non-stop action of the previous book, a lot of the story is almost sedate, with back-room plotting, surveillance operations, meetings and meals. This is not to say that the plot is in any way less gripping – on the contrary – just that you are not going to get quite as solid a diet of gunshots and axeblows as in the previous book.
There is violence, certainly, but much of it is telegraphed in advance. Even the surprising tying up of one loose end.
A courtroom drama in the end chapters. Swedish law procedures are obviously quite different to English law. A lawyer is able to question several witnesses at once, for example. That struck me as quite odd, but it works in the book.
I’ve given it five stars. Not for the great literary merit of the writing. Realistically, it’s what you’d expect from a journalist. But for the intricate plot, the complex characters – and their relationships – and the way it drags the reader along without resorting to too many simple tricks.