My wonderful husband took it upon himself to import the third Stieg Larsson book from the UK for me. Since it won't be coming out in the US until May, I am duly thrilled. So now I'm reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, which follows The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire.

The popular appeal of these books--the thing that has elevated them from other Scandinavian crime fiction this year--seems to be the pairing of two unlikely crime-solvers, neither of whom is the traditional gloomy detective weighed down by a drinking problem, ex-wife, and troubled young daughter. Instead, this time the troubled young girl is the unlikely crime-solver, whose involvement with magazine editor/writer Mikael Blomkvist begins as a financial arrangement, becomes sexual (as these things are wont to do), and finally becomes a matter of dire necessity as Lisbeth must clear her name, rid herself of her psychopathic father, expose the decades-old conspiracy that protected him, and, I hope, finally gain her independence. That might sound like a lot of tasks for one novel to accomplish, but, well, it is 600 pages long.

Uneducated, anti-social, and psychologically maladjusted, Lisbeth Salander seems an odd choice of heroine, but as we come to see, Lisbeth has been made what she is by a system that only she is in the unique position to expose. Psychological oddities aside, she is a kind of postmodern Robin Hood in black leather, combining her outstanding abilities at both computer hacking and real-life play-acting to rob from the rich, expose the corrupt, and enact perfect acts of revenge against those who have wronged her. My hope is that as Larsson shifts Lisbeth from her role as victim of a very specifically abusive mental health system to that of victim of a far-reaching political conspiracy, he does not forget the qualities that made her so attractive in the first place. Most of all, I hope that 500 pages from now Lisbeth, now in her mid- to late-twenties, finally gains independence from the system that has oppressed her since her early teens. That would be a true triumph, for both author and character.