Book Review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (48 in 2012? #9)

     As much as I have enjoyed Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander novels they have been far from perfect.  The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest takes that imperfection and turns it up to ten.  The driving events are so preposterous it's hard to take the final novel of the series as seriously as its predecessors.  At the same time, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest is hard to put down.  Larsson has created characters that one is willing to spend time with no matter if the story they are involved with works or not, which in itself is a great achievement.
     The book chronicles Mikael Blomkvist's attempts to prove Lisbeth Salander innocent of the events that occurred in the previous novel and thwart the plans of a clandestine government agency trying to quiet everyone who can out them.  There are many problems with how the plot plays out, but my biggest hang up is the members of the agency themselves.  The reader is supposed to believe that the members of this secret group, who have been functioning for over 30 years, who are having people killed, phones tapped, residences bugged, can't pick up on the fact that people are doing the same stuff to them.  Blomkvist can figure out that the police have a tail on him, but highly trained members of the secret governmental agency have no clue.  I found that hard to believe and once you lose that the plot falls to pieces.
     Even if the story felt ridiculous, I kept reading because, if anything else, this novel does a good job of wrapping up the time we've spent with the characters over two other books.  Larsson's greatest accomplishment is creating a group of characters that are endlessly interesting and entertaining.  Many times over the three novels I found myself ravenously reading pages upon pages of mundane detail and I can't credit that to anything but the depth of the characters.  I shouldn't care how many frozen pizzas Salander picks up at a convenience store but I do.  Larsson makes all the time and emotion put into the characters pay off.  We're given resolution without tying everything up with a pretty bow.  The characters have problems that may never be solved but that's what makes them so enduring in the first place.
     The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest has more problems then I'd wish to get into here.  It is far from the great or perfect novel people make it out to be.  But in the end, character rises above everything else.  It's a good read, not a great one, and even though, plot wise, it's a poor ending to the saga, it works as an endcap to our time with the characters.