From the mailbag

This just in: our galley copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, which is being released in the U.S. on May 25.

I still think it was silly of Knopf to wait so long to release Hornet (why punish the first, and probably most loyal, fans of the series? not to mention, the below screen cap suggests there were more than a few sales lost to ebooks, the UK edition and illegal downloads) but it has made the release of the finale an anticipated event.

To do our part to fan the flames, here’s an excerpt from the first chapter:

The girl on the guerney could live with a piece of lead in her hip and a piece of lead in her shoulder. But a piece of lead inside her brain was a trauma of a whole different magnitude. He was suddenly aware of the nurse saying something.

“Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”

“It’s her.”

“What do you  mean?”

“It’s Lisbeth Salander. The girl they’ve been hunting for the past few weeks, for the triple murder in Stockholm.”

Jonasson looked again at the unconscious patient’s face. He realized at once that the nurse was right. He and the whole of Sweden had seen Salander’s passport photograph on billboards outside every newspaper kiosk for weeks. And now the murderer herself had been shot, which was surely poetic justice of a sort.

But that was not his concern. His job was to save his patient’s life, irrespective of whether she was a triple murderer or a Nobel Prize winner. Or both.

Though I haven’t read the series, this is an intriguing opening. And speaking of intriguing, the actress who plays Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish films is definitely that. Check out the trailer for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest below. (We’ll get our own English-language version of the first Salander adventure in 2012.)

Are you counting the days until May 25?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fccRlpFuLo&feature=related]