Hell Bent by Leigh BardugoMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
It's been over three years since Leigh Bardugo began her twisted journey into the secret societies of Yale with Ninth House, riding the wave of dark academia long before it started cresting to the heights seen today. Her deadliest book yet by far, certainly not at all for kids or even teens with its violent hellish scares. And now, after a long, long hiatus, Bardugo is back with the long-awaited sequel, promising to resolve the previous volume's infamous cliffhanger ending.
It's a leisurely journey to resolving that cliffhanger, and there's a few more flashbacks even further into the past than the wild events of Last Fall that led to Darlington's current crappy circumstances. Flashbacks which reveal how Alex Stern got involved, however briefly, with Israeli gangster Eitan (who, let's face it, looks and acts more like a stereotypical Russian Mafiya enforcer, though since a lot of Israelis are of Russian Ashkenazi descent, it's not a stretch.) Definitely this book makes Ninth House feel like so much Prolonged Prologue in comparison, and it doesn't end on quite the maddening cliffhanger this time...but you know it's not the end of the story when it's less than 50 pages to the end and there's still a big mission ahead. Already, though, Goodreads has an entry for the planned third book, so hopefully Bardugo doesn't take another three years on that one...
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