Book Review: The girl who kicked the hornet's nest

Don't know which is more exhausted, my mind or my hands...this is a big book.  I have had this on my pile to read since early in the year and have been waiting for a long break from other things so that I could devote my time to it.  When I read the first two books in this Millenium trilogy I found myself incapable of putting them down except to sleep, and even then it was hard.

Within a couple of pages of this third book I was back in the darkness of the end of the second and all the nasty characters flooded back.  This book is so much more about Salander than before and a side effect of reading her story is my cancellation of several online memberships I joined when I was bored..... who knows who has been reading my hard drive now.  One of the telling aspects of this book was the obvious gap between the intelligence and understandings of the old guard and the realities of life in this technological web....the certainties held by those members of "The Section", as Blomkvist called them, are no longer certain; secrets can be unlocked in ways never imagined in the past.

This story is as violent and judgemental as its predecessors, readers being swept along with Blomkvist's convictions and morality.  I wanted the resolution of Salander's life to be what it was, and I expected Berger to make the decisions she did.  I have no knowledge of Europe in the Cold War except as a reader, but I suspect books give us only the tip of the iceberg - I am thankful to have lived in the distant South Pacific.  

This review is for me but still I have not revealed the storyline since others may well read my thoughts here.  I am driven to read books that swallow me into their story so that time outside the book ceases to exist; where did the last two days go?  That said, I think the characters can end here and I do not pine for a surprise find on a lost Larsson laptop.  These people, Salander and Blomkvist and all the others....they have had enough excitment in their lives and I'm not sorry their stories have stopped.  

Anything I read next will seem lighter by comparison.