The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest
Stieg Larsson, 2007
★ 4.25 from 793.5k ratings on Goodreads
Mystery, thriller & crime Literary fiction
A wounded woman, an ER doctor counting minutes, and a journalist in handcuffs—a thriller about the machinery that protects secret power. A dense, procedural thriller that hums with institutional power, moral unease and a slow-building dread.
Feels like curiosity, unease and dread. About power, society and morality.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy courtroom and newsroom machinery, stubborn heroines and stories about hidden power. Be warned that some readers found this finale overlong and more predictable, and less mysterious, than the earlier books.
Why read it
It closes a long story about who gets protected and who pays, giving you the satisfaction of watching public systems and private motives collide.
A page from the book
Medicine’s humbling truth, told as a story about a windowsill.
"On the other hand," Ellis went on, "I had a forty-two-year-old patient in Stockholm some years ago who banged his head on a windowsill. He began to feel sick immediately and was taken by ambulance to the ER. When I got to him he was unconscious. He had a small bump and a very slight bruise. But he never regained consciousness and died after nine days in intensive care. To this day I have no idea why he died. In the autopsy report, we wrote brain haemorrhage resulting from an accident, but not one of us was satisfied with that assessment. The bleeding was so minor, and located in an area that shouldn’t have affected anything else at all. And yet his liver, kidneys, heart, and lungs shut down one after the other. The older I get, the more I think it’s like a game of roulette. What readers say
Readers found the finale gripping and suspenseful, with a satisfying payoff and a compelling heroine; many were sad the series ended. Some, however, thought it overlong, predictable, and less mysterious than earlier books.
Stieg Larsson.Larsson, a Swedish journalist and anti-fascist researcher, died in 2004, before any of the Millennium novels were published; he had outlined ten books.
Books that feel like this
More by Stieg Larsson
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson, 2005
A disgraced financial journalist and a furious young hacker are drawn into a forty-year-old disappearance on a snowbound Swedish island, where a rich family keeps its secrets.
The Girl Who Played with Fire
Stieg Larsson, 2006
A hacker with a photographic memory returns from the Caribbean to a Sweden where a triple murder points at her.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy courtroom and newsroom machinery, stubborn heroines and stories about hidden power. Be warned that some readers found this finale overlong and more predictable, and less mysterious, than the earlier books.
- What is The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest like?
- A dense, procedural thriller that hums with institutional power, moral unease and a slow-building dread. Feels like curiosity, unease and dread. About power, society and morality.
- What should I read after The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest?
- If you liked The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, try The Lost Symbol (Dan Brown), Seven Days in May (Fletcher Knebel) and The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins).
A taste of the feed
A handful of men can stop the government from falling off a monument.
All you’ve got to know is this: right now the government of the United States is sitting on top of the Washington Monument, right on the very point, tilting right and left and ready to fall off and break up on the pavement. There are just a handful of men that can prevent it. And you’re one of them.
Seven Days in May · Fletcher Knebel
A home you can't stop looking at, even though it hurts.
I lived at number twenty-three Blenheim Road for five years, blissfully happy and utterly wretched. I can’t look at it now. That was my first home. Not my parents’ place, not a flatshare with other students, my first home. I can’t bear to look at it. Well, I can, I do, I want to, I don’t want to, I try not to. Every day I tell myself not to look, and every day I look. I can’t help myself, even though there is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me.
The Girl on the Train · Paula Hawkins
When authority is challenged by brutality, the line between life and death evaporates.
“Put that gun down,” Rafter ordered from the doorway, and a split second later another shot rang through the reception area, a shot that went into the ceiling somewhere well above Rafter’s head and reduced him to a mere mortal. Turning the gun back to me, he nodded, and I complied, entering the conference room behind Rafter. The last thing I saw on the outside was Madam Devier shaking at her desk, terror-stricken, headset around her neck, high heels parked neatly next to her wastebasket.
The Street Lawyer · John Grisham
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