But in the middle of it all stands Galaxy Stern, the girl who sees ghosts. The stories all come together in the end - a swirl of blood and heartbreak, fentanyl and magic. There are powers at Yale who want it to be simple, ugly reality: just a girl killed by a boyfriend too high to know what he was doing. There's the question of what happened to Tara, the question of what happened to Alex that put her on this path in the first place (a bloody and ragged little story that gets pieced out bit by bit and is nothing like you'll expect it to be - right up until it becomes obvious exactly what it is), and the question of what Alex did to end up alone, without allies, poking around the murder of some town girl. What follows is a spiraling helix of a story - a twisty (and twisted) flash-back/flash-forward see-saw that balances three central and interlinked mysteries. She is as disbelieving as any of us, as innocent, as skeptical, as furious. it is Alex that makes 'Ninth House' so readable. Skull and Bones can read the future of the stock market in blood and guts. Because in Bardugo's version of Yale the societies all exist around a particular school of powerful magic.

And where she ends up is Yale, to join Lethe, the eponymous Ninth House which oversees the rituals and gatherings of the eight other 'Houses of the Veil' - the so-called secret societies that practice there - Skull and Bones, Berzelius, Scroll and Key, the rest. This is Ninth House, the first adult novel by YA bestseller Leigh Bardugo. Give me a troubled girl (read: violent girl, ex-junkie girl, and a small-time drug dealer, too) who can see ghosts walking the streets of L.A., snatched out of obscurity, from near death by a mysterious cabal of powerful people who want to trade her a second chance at a decent life for the temporary use of her abilities - to keep watch over the bloody, mystical, dangerous activities of the secret societies who surreptitiously control the fates of nations, markets, the world. A haruspex up to his elbows in blood, scrying the guts of a schizophrenic stolen from his bed in a New Haven reading buy and hold orders for the NASDAQ. A glamor to cloud the minds of security guards. Give me a ritual for an unbreakable pre-nup. I have little use these days for old beardos in pointy wizard hats, for powerful ancient necromancers or prancing elves. Grungy, dirty, street-side magic - hard-earned, poorly understood, wild and dangerous. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Ninth House Author Leigh Bardugo

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo