Stingless hornets?

[matt_doyle]

FInished The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest this morning.  It made some improvements -- Larsson's prose style is more suited to a spy thriller, dry and informative with hot bursts of violence, than to a murder mystery or an organized crime thriller.  The prose is better.  The text seemed a little less offensive to me, too, as he got better as discussing problems of systemic violence against women without fetishizing them quite so much.  And only one woman fell in love with the author-insert male protagonist this time!  And implied he might give up his philandering ways!

That said, unlike the last two books, there was no shocking moment where the action kicked in and I realized what the whole book was really about.  And the author gave his bad guys no credit and no success -- it was nice to watch them get sucked down by their own arrogance, but I would have liked a little more finesse, a little more suspense.  

So, I saw the problems as less pronounced than the previous books, but the strengths also felt a little flat, the action stale.

Glad I read them.  Unlikely to re-read.  Not sure if I want to see the movies -- movies are unfortunately good at fetishizing sexualized violence and not that great at conveying messages about systemic evils.