It has taken a remarkably short time for the Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson to become a worldwide sensation. He was almost unknown outside Sweden when the first volume of his Millennium trilogy was published there in 2005, but last year global sales of his books were exceeded only by Khaled Hosseini. The English version of the third volume of the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, has been eagerly awaited and is being published amid the kind of security usually reserved for the new Harry Potter. This is partly because the second volume ended with a cliff-hanger, its heroine Lisbeth Salander suspended between life and death, and readers naturally want to know what happens next.

It’s also because the new novel is more than the final volume in the trilogy. “Millennium III” is the last novel completed by Larsson before his sudden death in 2004. There are rumours of an unfinished work, but The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is elegiac in many respects. Of course, Salander survives; that is evident from the title. But she faces another threat from sinister forces that had her declared mentally incompetent and sent her to a cruel institution when she was a child.

They want her locked up again and are working to have her charged with two murders in Stockholm and the attempted murder of her father, a Russian gangster. To begin with, all Salander has on her side is the ever-faithful Mikael Blomkvist, an editor at Millennium magazine, and a hospital doctor who isn’t convin-ced by lurid stories declaring her a lesbian Satanist. Salander and Blom- kvist met in the first volume of the trilogy, when she helped him expose a Swedish industrialist with a pathological hatred of women, but they were estranged throughout the second novel, communicating only through cyberspace. One of Blomkvist’s challenges in the new novel is to find a way of communicating with her despite the police guard on her hospital room, and what he comes up with is predictably ingenious.

At the heart of the book is a high-level conspiracy that brings together two of Larsson’s abiding concerns: hatred of women, and the threat to Swedish democracy posed by right-wing elements in the security service. It solves the mysteries set up in the first two Millennium novels and explains how Salander became what she is: a grown-up and horribly abused version of the popular Swedish children’s heroine, Pippi Longstocking. That is sufficient to compensate for the longueurs of the first 100 pages, which involve a lot of business left over from the second volume; new characters are introduced with bewildering speed to explain the conspiracy against Salander, and it is only then that the novel really takes off.

The book is a reminder of Larsson’s strengths and a few weakness- es. Blomkvist’s vanity is trying, as every woman he meets falls for him, and the reliance on violence as a solution to loose ends is uncomfortable. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is not really a standalone read like the earlier novels, but the completion of the trilogy confirms Larsson as one of the great talents of contemporary crime fiction.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
MacLehose Press £18.99 pp602

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