So after reading the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I found myself mildly annoyed to find that I absolutely had to read the next one. The Girl who Played With Fire was consistently more exciting than Tattoo. It was exciting just about all the way through and I very much enjoyed the character development. It ended on somewhat of a cliff hanger, yet it still felt like it wrapped up nicely. Nothing drives me up the wall more in books than a story that has a sequel and is left hanging at the end of the book. I have great admiration for a novelist who can leave a story open to continuation without feeling like the story cut off mid sentence. 
After Fire I took a brief hiatus from the Girl Who books and read something different on the kobo for a change. I picked up The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. Disappointing. It started off threatening to make me sob like I did in Marley and Me as Enzo the dog told about getting old. The rest of the story, as told by Enzo, followed his owner Denny's marriage, birth of his daughter, death of his wife, and resulting custody battle with the in-laws. The book was full of meanness and Denny constantly being beaten down by life. It was not an upper. I sort of enjoyed Enzo's character voice, but for a dog who was being written as a dog, he bordered into way too human at times. I for one, am a big believer in dog personalities, but Enzo became almost creepily person-like at times and then would flip back to being totally dog-like on the next page. The book was also peppered with analogies to car racing and techniques that I assume were supposed to be a metaphor for life and the trails and tribulations, but I'm not a fan of car racing and was big-time bored by these chapters, despite Enzo's enthusiasm with recalling specific racing moments. I would give The Art of Racing in the Rain a pass. 
I did finish it in about two days however, which left me without a book and drawn back to the Girl Who saga, promptly buying The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. The final book in the trilogy did not disappoint. The excitement and intrigue and conspiracies ran throughout and there was just enough bad-guy behaviour to make it really satisfying when the good guys got a leg up every now and again. References to the first book occasionally really reinforced for me that Larsson had intended to write the story in three parts and that it wasn't just a coincidence that after the success of his first book he wrote two more. I'm totally with the rest of his fans who feel his untimely death was a terrible shame. NOW, I'm onto The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World one Correction at a Time by Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson. So far, so good!
