I've been reading a lot less than usual lately due to podcast and thanks to my blasted brother, anime, filling the same time spaces, but I did finish Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo, the second one of her Alex Stern books which was, I think a considerable improvement on the first one, at least for my money. It's still about a young woman who can see, speak to and use ghosts, who is studying at Yale, but only on sufferance (she's far too poor to go there) because she's working for magical secret society, but it's got a bit more energy, in part because it has less backstory to explain and more story to tell. Bardugo herself went to Yale and it shows, because she loves the place as a place perhaps just a little too much, but she was also in a secret society, and wow she paints those in an extremely negative light, so I guess there's a degree of give and take, and also doesn't shy away from highlighting Yale's grim past with slavery and so on.
Anyway I enjoyed it quite a lot of a sort of genuinely kind of creepy occult adventure novel. Much as I've enjoyed her later Grishaverse stuff, I'd kind of like to see more stuff from Bardugo along these lines.
