The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest is about two people who are thrown together under extraordinary circumstances. These two are the main characters of the book. One is called Mikael Blomkvist, who edits a magazine known as the Millennium. The other is Lisbeth Salander, a small, lithe “goth” girl who has remarkable hacking skills. She is the “girl” in all three of the author’s books in this series.

The Millenium is a magazine which was mainly focussed on exposing radical and racial groups in the vicinity, which is probably semi-autobiographical, since the author himself worked for a magazine called Expo that was dedicated to the same causes. Salander is a reckless girl with a rather complicated past, and along with Blomkvist, she takes on all the criminals of the European world in The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest.

The first book of the series, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, opens with Blomkvist’s reputation coming under the scanner because of a libel verdict, owing to which he is forced to turn to a private assignment that a rich industrialist, Henrik Vanger, submits for his consideration. In the course of this assignment, Blomkvist meets Salander and the duo that dominates the series is born.