Recently, the behavioural researchers at Cornell University, US, have concluded that female fantasy and mystery writers are more adept at handling and solving mysteries than their male counterparts. Be it Agatha Christie or Sue Grafton, women mystery writers have always excelled in the sphere of intrigue, espionage, puzzles and suspense.
They are naturally gifted with the knack of plotting and hatching. Leigh Bardugo is a worthy name to be inducted into the world of female mystery writers. Author of The Shadow & Bone Trilogy, The Language of Thorns, among others, Leigh’s Ninth House is yet another masterpiece. Here, it must be mentioned that the novel is not a mere figment of imagination.
Ninth House is a quasi-realistic mystery that has elements of magic and arcane occultism. Seasoned readers of mysteries and detective novels are well aware that a murder is a de rigueur in this particular genre. Now there’s a dead girl on the campus.
The protagonist Alex Stern gets the whiff of it and smells a rat. She has been tasked with monitoring the mysterious activities of Yale’s secret societies-societies that have yielded some of the most famous and influential people in the world. Yale’s secret societies have always been shrouded in mysteries. To quote Edgar Allan Poe, the US writer who himself lived mysteriously, “Yale has a macabre story to tell.”
The sinister activities in these carefully guarded societies are unfathomable until one becomes a part of one of them. Indian writer Dilip Chitre also wrote a piece in now defunct ‘Probe’ that, “A palpable feeling of mystery engulfed me when I strolled with my American host on the campus of Yale University.” Leigh has captured the denseness of events unfolding at Yale. She has masterfully introduced these aspects to her absorbing plot and woven a cobweb of mystery, magic and murder, a deadly trio.
