The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
By Stieg Larsson
MacLehose Press £18.99, 602 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19

If fans of the first two of Stieg Larsson’s mega-selling Millennium trilogy feared that his tales of dark doings in Sweden might not delight to the last, they need not have worried.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest begins where its predecessors left off, gripping the reader in a relentlessly fast narrative. Some novels claim to be page turners. This trilogy is the real deal. The latest book is the culmination of a fight against sinister forces by elfin über-hacker Lisbeth, backed by her ally Mikael, a crusading journalist.

As in the first two books of the trilogy, the writing is sometimes naive and some of the plot far-fetched. But an idealistic underpinning to the writing and the sheer pace of it all helps the reader get past that.

Larsson, himself a crusading journalist, died aged 50 in 2004 – before his books were published. It is a great pity that we are to read no more from him.