La reina en el palacio de las corrientes de aire (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) Book

What I learned from this book (in no particular order):

1. You can use duct tapes to close up serious wounds; they keep the blood in and the germs out.

2. You can be shot in the head and STILL have photographic memory, though annoyingly, you will forget the solution to that pesky Fermat's Theorem that you have just discovered.

3. Congenital analgesia is a useful condition to have for mafia henchmen and Bond villains.

4. Muscular, one meter eighty-four tall Latina policewomen who can out-wrestle a man are HOT.

5. Middle-aged, out of shape Swedish journalists are powerful chick magnets.

6. Threesomes and other bedroom antics involving leather, especially if you are stupid enough to record them, WILL come back to haunt you.

7. "Statistics showed that the absolute majority of people who harassed women were men." Yes, we know it, that barring a few notable exceptions, most men are SADISTIC PIGS, PERVERTS AND RAPISTS!

8. "The majority of poison pen artists were either teenagers or the middle-aged." Only people between 26 and 54 years of age are crazy enough to become stalkers.

9. Amazons are cool because they were willing to cut off their right breasts to be better archers. They also liked to copulate with random men to make babies.

10. Meatballs with potatoes and Lingonberry sauce are good Swedish food.


BUT SERIOUSLY,

this final book in the Millennium Trilogy is a let down compared to its predecessors. The conspirators who protected Zalachenko and committed Salander into the asylum are revealed early on in the novel, thus removing any sense of mystery. The pair of elderly, terminally ill men who lead them are so out-gunned, out-maneuvered and out-hacked by the good guys from the beginning that there is hardly any suspense left. Salander herself spent the majority of her time on a hospital bed, convalescing from the shot in the head that she received from Zalachenko. The previous books were able to succeed largely because of the peculiar originality of her character and the outrageous stunts that she pulled. With those elements missing, what is left is a rather predictable police procedural filled with tedious bureaucratic wrangling and dull talking heads. The pace picks up a bit with the trial and the novel ends with a sorely needed action piece that provides a closure to Salander's dark past, but it is nowhere near the level of the exciting episodes that preceded it. Still, if you have read them, you will want to read this one too, if only to get a satisfying ending for Salander, Blomkvist and other characters that we have came to know from the series.

My review of


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