The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest starts where The Girl Who Played with Fire ended: with Lisbeth Salander being shot. And while she is in hospital, the preparations for her trial start. With a prosecutor influenced by "the Section", a secret division within the Swedish Security Service, who wants Salander locked up in a psychiatric institute. Something they already accomplished when Salander was a teenager. On the other hand, Mikael Blomkvist, together with the team of the Millenium magazine, and his sister, a lawyer, try to help Salander and to uncover the conspiracy...

I also enjoyed this third and final novel in the Millenium trilogy. It was again well-written and captivating. The highlight for me was the battle in court between Blomkvist's sister and the psychiatrist. The only downside was the length of the book with almost 750 pages...

Quotes from the book

"It's Lisbeth Salander. The girl they've been hunting for the past few weeks, for the triple murder in Stockholm." [...] He realized at once that nurse Nicander was right. He and the whole of Sweden had seen her passport photograph on billboards outside every newspaper kiosk for weeks. And now the murderer herself had been shot, which was surely poetic justice of a sort. But that was not his concern. His job was to save his patient's life, irrespective of whether she was a triple murderer or a Nobel Prize winner.

"She was conscious the whole time. Not only that; she was terribly frightened, of course, but she was completely rational. Her only problem was that she had an arrow through her skull."

"Can't someone give that man early retirement? He's a walking catastrophe."

"He was high as a kite all night."

"I'm beginning to understand why she felt an uncontrollable urge to slam an axe into your head."

He did not want Niedermann to die. Niedermann was his son. But regrettable as it was, Niedermann must not be captured alive. He had never been arrested, and Zalachenko could not predict how he would react under interrogation. He doubted that Niedermann would be able to keep quiet, as he should. So it would be a good thing if he were killed by the police.

"We're so secret that we don't exist."

"You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn't much time left."

She wondered why she, who had such difficulty talking about herself with people of flesh and blood, could blithely reveal her most intimate secrets to a bunch of completely unknown freaks on the Internet. The fact was that if Salander could claim to have any sort of family or group affiliation, then it was with these lunatics.

On the Net, Plague was an intelligent and socially gifted citizen. In real life he was a severely overweight and socially challenged thirty-year-old living on disability benefit in Sundbyberg. He bathed too seldom and his apartment smelled like a monkey house.

"Lisbeth, I can't break the law." - "You don't have to break any law. But you do have to shut your eyes to the fact that I am."

"If you ever go near her house again, or send her email or otherwise molest her, I'll be back. I'll beat you so hard that even your own mother won't recognize you."

"It is my unenviable duty to inform you that the Prosecutor General has decided that you are to be arrested for such a long string of crimes that it will surely take weeks to compile a comprehensive catalogue of them."