'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest,' audiobook read by Simon Vance (Random House Audio, 16 compact discs, unabridged, $40). DAYTON, Ohio -- Stieg Larsson was the editor-in-chief for the Swedish magazine Expo. In 2004, he gave his publisher the manuscript for a Millennium trilogy of novels. Shortly thereafter, he was going to his office and the elevator wasn't working. Larsson climbed up seven flights of stairs, collapsed and died. He was 50. The first book in the trilogy, 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,' became an international bestseller. The second book, 'The Girl Who Played With Fire,' was another blockbuster. The final book, 'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest,' has been one of the most highly anticipated books of 2010. The two main characters in this series are Lisbeth Salander, a young Swedish computer hacker, and Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist who writes for a Swedish magazine. As this final book opens, a helicopter is transporting gravely injured people to a hospital. Salander is one of the injured parties. She has suffered life-threatening gunshot wounds. Blomkvist was at the crime scene and placed Salander on the helicopter. 'Hornet's Nest' starts as a murder mystery and quickly morphs into a medical thriller, as doctors perform emergency surgery in an attempt to save Salander's life. Meanwhile, she is under police guard, accused of murder. This series is so popular -- I tried to resist it. I could not. After reading 100 pages I was completely hooked. At that point I switched to the audiobook version because I wanted to hear all the different characters' voices. This book is much more than crime fiction. It shifts seamlessly from murder mystery to medical thriller to police procedural to spy novel to cyber thriller. While Salander recuperates at the hospital, Blomkvist attempts to expose a conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of the Swedish security apparatus. 'Hornet's Nest' is a high-test, high-tech sprint. Combine military secrets, Soviet spycraft, slave labor and child pornography with cutting-edge computer hackers and you have a recipe for excitement that bubbles with suspense. Salander and Blomkvist are charismatic, eccentric characters who carry this story along at full speed along twin tracks. The author's posthumous success caused some complications for those he left behind. Larsson's father and brother reaped the financial rewards from his books. Larsson never married his longtime companion, but she has possession of his laptop computer. It reputedly contains most of the draft of an unfinished fourth novel that might be worth a lot if it can be turned into another book. Now there is a tug-of-war over possession of that. Will 'Hornet's Nest' be the last book from Stieg Larsson? His former companion, Eve Gabrielsson, hopes so. According to an article in The New York Times, there is no provision in Sweden for common-law marriages, and Larsson died without leaving any will. The article continues: 'as for the novel on the laptop, she said she hoped that it would never be published.' Does 'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest' merit the hype? This reviewer thinks so. Simon Vance's spectacular reading of the audiobook is certainly worth a listen, too. Vick Mickunas writes for the Dayton Daily News. E-mail: vick@vickmickunas.com. 