Characters grab our imagination when they work against our expectations, and this is certainly the case with Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander. She's petite and young and we expect her to be vulnerable yet she is fierce; she is (apparently) mentally incapacitated, yet is also brilliant. Above all is the fact that this character so brutally treated by powerful male villains uses her strengths to get back at her tormentors in ingenious ways. This is a female action figure no one had seen until Larsson gave her to us. Salander is the main reason I put up with the lack of editing in the first two books, DRAGON and FIRE.

HORNET'S NEST opens with our tattooed heroine confined to a hospital bed. For the first half of the book, I kept thinking that any moment, she was going to throw off the sheets and do something exciting. Halfway through, Salander was still in bed doing a little emailing but not much else. Since I'd invested a significant amount of time in HORNET'S, I hung in there for all 563 pages. Thankfully, she finally got up in the end. If you loved the first two books, you might get some enjoyment from this final book of the Millennium trilogy. But my recommendation would be to skip this one and wait for the movie.