Now, she’s trying to distance herself from past mistakes, but going straight isn’t easy. And to rob their fellow magicians, they need Charlie. Gloamists guard their secrets greedily, creating an underground economy of grimoires. She’s spent half her life working for gloamists, magicians who manipulate shadows to peer into locked rooms, strangle people in their beds, or worse. The catch: she is to monitor Yale's elite secret societies, who have their own dark secrets.Charlie Hall has never found a lock she couldn’t pick, a book she couldn’t steal, or a bad decision she wouldn’t make. High-school dropout and homicide survivor Alex Stern is given an unlikely free ride at Yale University. If you like this, read: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (Orion, 2019, $17.95, buy here), another dark adult debut from a bestselling young-adult author.

Room for a sequel? No shadow of a doubt there. The novel enjoyably pours itself into the shape of a fantasy heist, and ends on a canny cliffhanger. Prickly, jaded Charlie harps perhaps too much on her tendency to make bad decisions, but there is pleasure in the details of her thieving prowess. Once the plot gets going, however, it proves absorbing enough. The early part of the novel is devoted to set-up and thus a bit of a chore to get through, and the magic system is neither dazzling nor original. The untethered shadow of a dead gloamist becomes a Blight, which may run rampant and commit massacres. Gloamists covet ancient documents for dangerous experiments, sometimes dying if a PDF is digitised wrong. In a shady underworld controlled by a corrupt cabal, people sell their shadows for a quick buck, or have them stolen for the black market. Book Of Night joins Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (2019) and Veronica Roth's Chosen Ones (2020) on the better end of the spectrum.īlack has put much thought into building a world set aslant from ours by an explosion of shadow magic, which has deepened the divide between the haves and have-nots. She is among a slew of hit young-adult authors who have lately taken the leap into adult fiction, with varying results. Black has been working in children's and young-adult fantasy fiction for 20 years, producing bestsellers such as her series The Folk Of The Air, starting with The Cruel Prince (2018, buy here, borrow here).

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