I’ve read Leigh Bardugo before, specifically I read Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom a few years ago. From a promotion for Hell Bent, the second Alex Stern book which came out in January of this year, I got a chance to snag a copy of the first, Ninth House.

I feel like I’ve been kind of blessed this year in that I keep finding books that I actually like, and early on! Ninth House scratched an itch for Dark Academia, Noir, Murder Mysteries, and necromancy, ghosts, and the paranormal— anyone who knows me knows that I’d have taken any one of those individually. Ninth House delivered all.

The switching between two main timelines, illustrating Alex Stern’s, our antiheroine’s, guilt and culpability in the plot was well paced and a neat unfolding. Nothing ever felt forced or sandwiched in, though there was a distinct a and b storyline. The interwoven noir elements as she investigates a murder and the potential involvement of the magic user’s secret society houses felt like a separate style almost, the storytelling split between the mystery and the emotional involvement of Alex’s own revelations, but gently switching so that readers had natural breaks in what could be a heavy story.

It is Bardugo’s first ‘adult’ novel though I always struggle to understand what that means —it means sex. All of the excellence of her writing style, but now we can talk about hard ons. Publishing is a silly place. I’m excited now to read Hell Bent.