Given that Hornet’s Nest kicks off immediately following the events of Played with Fire, I was hoping that it could keep up the momentum of the previous book and avoid the slow first half / crazy second half that the previous two books had suffered from. Unfortunately, no such luck. If anything, it takes even longer to get moving and the conclusion isn’t quite as action packed as the previous novels.

On the other hand, I do feel like this was a solid conclusion to the series. It wrapped up a lot of loose ends that I hadn’t even realized I was missing and finished character arcs, particularly for Lisbeth. She’s still odd, but I’m really starting to understand where she comes from. And in the end, she wins. I would have been rather grumpy with the author (even if he is dead) had she not come out all right in the end.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo took a while to get into. It wasn’t until Lisbeth and Blomkvist were finally in the same place perhaps halfway through the book that things really started moving.

The Girl Who Played with Fire is much the same.

It’s not that often any more that I finish a book in a day. That should tell you something about what I thought about the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Especially when it isn’t fantasy. It isn’t science fiction. It isn’t horror (at least not the supernatural sort). Really, it’s more of a investigation / thriller. Not a genre that I read that often.

Honestly, for the first half of the book, I wasn’t sure that I was even going to finish it, let alone read the sequels. There were a few different story lines going on that I didn’t really see how they fit together. Nothing overly much seemed to be happening. Then, around halfway through (when the main characters finally started to interact more), things really started moving. I read the rest of the book in one sitting.