When we last saw Lisbeth Salander, she was teetering between life and death. And who wouldn’t be after having been shot by her father and buried alive by her brother? Salander was rescued, at the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009), by journalist Mikael Blomkvist. She’s now in a Swedish hospital, slowly mending and awaiting trial for three murders she didn’t commit. Meanwhile, her father, a former Soviet spy, is down the hall, recovering from the injuries he sustained when Lisbeth stuck an ax in his head. Blomkvist, Salander’s loyal friend, sets out to prove her innocence, but to do so he must expose a decades-old conspiracy within the Swedish secret service that has resulted in, among other travesties, a lifetime of abuse heaped upon Salander, whose very life threatens to expose the deadly charade. The late Larsson (this third novel in his Millennium Trilogy is his final book) can be accused of heaping too much plot between two covers—in addition to the Salander story, there is an elaborate subplot involving Blomkvist’s lover, Erica, and her travails as the first female editor of a major Stockholm newspaper—but he is remarkably agile at keeping multiple balls in the air. But it wouldn’t really matter if he weren’t a skilled craftsman because Salander is such a bravura heroine—steel will and piercing intelligence veiling a heartbreaking vulnerability—that we’d willingly follow her through any bramble bush of a plot. She spends more than half of this novel in a hospital bed, but orchestrating the action from her Palm computer, she dominates the stage like Lear. There are few characters as formidable as Lisbeth Salander in contemporary fiction of any kind. She will be sorely missed. —Bill Ott

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.Larsson, Stieg (author).May 2010. 576p. Knopf, hardcover, $26.95 (9780307269997). REVIEW. First published March 15, 2010 (Booklist).

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