Harrow the Ninth: Locked Tomb Trilogy, Book 2

...but, y’know, in a good way. So, you’ve got your unreliable narrator, and your weird timeline stuff, and your hyper-goth Warhammer 40K riff, and your utterly heartbreaking fever dream of loss and forgetfulness and fractured memory, and then you add some vengeful planet-sized revenant-gods, and a little millennia-long interpersonal drama and betrayal, and doomed ghosts battling on the edge of a galaxy-sized necromantic river of souls, and the world’s worst dad joke, and then you load it into a shotgun and you shoot yourself in the face with it.I’m still not really sure what the hell’s going on, but it was a helluva ride.

The first book was so very very good. Sadly, this book was awful. I only finished it out of stubbornness. You spend the first full two thirds of the book with the characters powerless and confused. The plot never makes any progress. Promises made to the reader never materialize. Then the last third, the plot goes a bunch of meaningless directions. And in the end, I just didn't care. The first book was an amazing journey. This was a disappointing waste. I wish the author had done the 3-5 full scale revisions that were probably needed to get this to a good place.

The book begins with an incomprehensible but interesting action hook with a totally unnecessary spoiler, then provides a prologue, a pro-prologue which is completely unnecessary if you've read the first book, a retcon (or possibly its protagonists delusion), and then a mystery that if you've read the first book you already know the answer to and if you haven't will be totally incomprehensible.I find myself waiting for the denouement out of morbid curiosity more than anything else and would not recommend this book to anyone, especially not if they liked the first book.

I've read fun books. I've read funny book. I've read tense books. I've read scary books. I've read painful books. I've read sad books. I've read unique books. I've read thrilling books.Giden the Ninth was the most fun-funny-tense-scary-painful-sad-unique-thrilling book I've ever read. Was it perfect? No. There were a plotholes a very weeny construct could have slipped into. Sometimes Gideon was trying a BIT hard to be cool. But even so the one thing I wanted when I closed Giden the Ninth was MORE. Gideon was an overwhelming blow from a two-hander: it took my head off and it cleaved my heart.Harrow was not exactly what I wanted. I had reservations. I have never enjoyed the second person narrator in a novel, and Harrow isn't Gideon. I hung there, and considered myself to be "giving it a chance". My head stayed firmly on, and my heart was dubious.Harrow, though, is a rapier. It snuck into me sharply and cleanly almost without me noticing and took me apart just as efficiently as Gideon had. I have no idea when I crossed over from "giving it a chance" to "totally sucked in".Sequels are always a tricky thing. I won't lie - I was afraid that Harrow had fallen into the "great first, meh second" trap of many trilogies in the beginning. But I finished Harrow feeling completely satisfied with the experience and all I can say is that by the end, I had been given everything I didn't know I needed even if what I thought I wanted hadn't been there (mostly).Like Gideon, Harrow isn't a perfect book. But it was a joy and a pain and a thrill and fun and funny and the wait for Alecto will be a very difficult one.

I called the first book a rare gem and this installment is cut from the same stock.Blazed through the entire thing in a single sitting just after it was released yesterday and am on my first re-read now.While the pacing is a bit different from the first book, my initial reaction is a resounding WOW! This was everything one could ask for and more.No easy reading teenage romance for the functionally illiterate. This is a well crafted and multilayered novel of mystery, undead space monsters and swordplay, masterfully wrought together in a rich world. And an absolute romp at that!Just as the first book, it's irreverent to many established mores and may challenge fragile male egos and those wanting their story served up in a simple linear sequence of easily digested chunks.Fans of Iain M. Banks, Scott Hawkins and early Alastair Reynolds should feel right at home with the immersive "Show, don't tell" school of storytelling and high level of prose on display.My only regret is the long wait for the next installment!

This is *not* a sequel and does not continue the original story. 75% of the book has no plot. Scattered and irrelevant flashbacks waste most pages. If you liked the first book, don't get this one. Minimal inclusion of the engaging and humorous dialogue (or internal monologue) which made the first book such a pleasant surprise, and what's included here is only in the last few chapters. No spoilers, but *very* dissappointing ending. I won't buy the third book.

I actually found this book to be superior to the first one. Pacing is better and I didn't hate the narrative jumps here that often drive me batty in other books. Plus, something is going on with Harrow and we know that fundamentally she is not the same person who woke up on the Emperor's transport originally after the events in Canaan.The author does a good job tying the narrative into something larger and dealing with complex threads without things getting ridiculous. I suspect if you liked the first book, you'll like this one too.

The last third of the book makes you realize the first two thirds were just a clever ploy to get you stoked as all get out during that final third. Once you hit the coffee shop AU you’re almost there. Still more questions than answers and so I can’t wait for the third book. Switching between second person perspective is a FANTASTIC literary tool that melds into the reveal PERFECTLY. THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD ITS SO CLEVER I LOVE THIS TRIOLOGY MY POOR HEART HARROW AND GIDEON ARE IDIOTS A PERFECT TEAM AND YOU CANT HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER U FOOLS THE AUTHOR WEILDS GREAT POWER WAY TOO EFFECTIVELY WITH NO REMORSE

This is book two in the locked Tomb series. This is Science Fantasy or what was once known as space opera so pseudo magical powers and hand to hand combat involving swords goes hand in hand with Space Ships. Set in a futuristic empire where the Emperor Undying has mastered the power of death in his long war agaisnt a powerful enemy in book one the call went out to the nine houses of the empire to find new Lyctors, also known as Necro saints, the emperor’s most powerful servants most of the original nine have been destroyed in the long war. The events of that novel Gideon the ninth directly lead into this so if you are new go back and start there. While on the surface the format is near identical to Gideon the ninth, a young inexperienced queer protagonist is trying to find her way in a universe much bigger and more dangerous then she could imagine, in practice this is a very different experience.Where Gideon started her book as a fun loving teen desperate for adventure in a book who despite its Strange setting was mainly a straight forward adventure with a mystery at the heart of it, Harrow starts book two traumatised suffering from PTSD physically depleted with none of the combat skills that should have come with becoming a Lyctor, one of the Emperor’s undying Hands, with her Elders in the emperor’s service foretelling her demise. On top of that she is having recurring hallucinations, is at the mercy of the newly made lyctor Ianthe, and most worryingly can’t remember a certain someone from the first book and is instead remembering and dreaming about those events with another character in there place.All this set agaisnt the coming of the Emperor’s ancient, implacable enemy one who has destroyed Lyctors far more powerful and accomplished then Harrow.Told mainly in the 2nd person this is a gothic, overwrought tour de force of a novel while that may sound very dreary or dark while Harrow hasn’t the outsider perpesctive that Gideon had, Harrow is about as close to the ideal of a necromancer that you can get, Harrow is still a brilliant bitchy 17 year old with razor sharp observations and who is quick with a come back so the book is filled with humour if a good bit more pitch black then Gideon.The mythology expands and develops more about the emperor and his hands and there enemies are revealed even as it asks for more questions then it answers. Indeed if you were to pick a fault it’s that the ending doubles down on the mysterious and the metaphysical and has a lot going on to the point where I was not clear what happened at all on first reading and had to do a reread how you take that I suspect will directly affect how much you enjoy the book, in my case i thought it fit the whole tone of the book where Harrow, and the reader, doubted the reality Of everything and where unlike Gideon, Harrow neither expected or looked for easy answers.This is a amazing second book in many ways it’s a mediation on grief if shot through with some very funny moments, with it’s strength like Gideon the Ninth lying in its characters and there surprising depths and the strength of there entanglements with each other but it is brilliant and I now I wait with bated breath for book three. Magnificent.

I thoroughly enjoyed Gideon the Ninth, with its necromancer magic and sparky characters. Given the potentially universe-spanning canvas, the small-scale Agatha Christie style 'characters trapped in a mansion' mystery was unexpected and fun, but suggested the author's fondness for 'one-set' play-like stories might become an issue in subsequent books. This is borne out in the first two thirds of Harrow The Ninth, where we are given a second-person perspective of Harrow, a small cast, another 'trapped in a mansion' setting and another supposed mystery. It quickly becomes a frustrating read, as by page 63 it's abundantly clear what the topline 'mystery' of what has happened to Harrow and Gideon is, but it's not until around page 380 that this 'revelation' is provided in the story, so there's an awful lot of readerly waiting around in the meantime (particularly given that for a lot of it, Harrow doesn't have 'agency' and things just happen to her, which is narratively very unsatisfying). Fortunately Muir's always-interesting writing saves all this from becoming unbearable, and once the revelation is out things kick into several higher gears and Muir's creativity and imagination suddenly explode onto the page. The last 120 or so pages return to Gideon the Ninth greatness and leave us nicely set up for book 3. So if you find the much of the book less than satisfying, hang on in there because it brightens up hugely in the latter stages. If Muir had cut a couple of hundred pages from the 'pre-revelation' section and added more meat (as it were) to the post-revelation section then I'd have given this 5 stars, but as its stands for me it barely scraped 4.

I want to start with this - Harrow the Ninth confused the hell out of me but, for the most part, that was my fault and I do thoroughly recommend it (it will be interesting to see if others struggle also).Harrow the Ninth continues directly from Gideon the Ninth with the titular character as she steps into the world of the Lyctors. However, Harrow is extremely unwell and has obviously done something to herself - though we do not know what til much later - and has made a seemingly unwise deal with an enemy that leaves her without much of her power, her memories and perhaps her sanity. It's a great setup, I especially love the letters that Harrow has made for herself before the memory wipe that should be opened if certain things happen even if I question how Harrow knows these things will come to pass (we get some reveals to this effect but not a full accounting).That is only about half the book though. For the other half, we dive into what seems to be an alternate history of the first book - though it took me way too long to realise what was going on as I had not read Gideon the Ninth for ages. I feel this side is weaker even discounting my confusion but mostly because the reveals here seem somewhat disconnected from the more intriguing questions as to what has happened to Harrow and why did she do it.The actual reason I am docking a star is the same problem a lot of mystery stories run into; the final reveal of the real plot comes too quickly and is a little too dense to easily follow.I can't easily talk about this final section without engaging with spoilers so let me try to phrase it like this: imagine that the final reveal of your detective story didn't have the detective present - in fact the speech came from the perspective of a character who had appeared on the scene just for this reveal and is confused even as to who half the people present are. Then make it so a couple of characters share names (even the characters in story find that confusing). Finally add that we basically hadn't had any answers to any of the real meat of the mystery til this point. There is a really interesting set of reveals here, but combined with the confusion, the reveals are so fast that you don't get a chance to have one hit, process it, deal with its ramifications and then move to the next.In some ways I make this ending sound worse than it is - the problem you run into when dancing round spoilers - so let me end with this; whilst I feel the ending was messy I literally cannot wait for the next in the series. Heck, maybe some of the questions I have about the way the ending was presented here will be countered in its sequel. Either way, bring on Alecto.

Is this SF or fantasy? Rule of thumb: necromancy, magic, and a lot of fighting with swords, that's fantasy. Spaceships, advanced science - that's SF.But what about when they're all in there together? And what's more, the advanced science is necromancy?If that sort of question confuses you, you'd probably better not attempt 'The Locked Tomb' books. Because it gets a lot worse than that!If, however, you like complex but beautifully detailed world-building, vibrant characters, sharp dialogue and breathtaking action scenes, then you might want to give the series a try.You might still experience some confusion, though, because the plot isn't just convoluted, it's twisted half-way to insane. For example (while trying to avoid spoilers), the recollection you may have of events in the first book (and I would definitely recommend you read it before you attempt this one - it is NOT stand alone) is increasingly different from the main characters memories of those events. And some parts are written in a strange and different tense from others.It takes a lot of courage, if not outright cheek, for a writer to treat their readers like this. Muir gets away with it, firstly because she built up a huge amount of credit with me in the first book, and secondly because her writing is simply so good, so utterly engrossing that I was prepared to put up with the abuse just to find out what happened next!And what happens next did not disappoint. Not that it got any less confusing, but some things were explained. The weird style of writing some passages, for example, is not only fully justified but indeed demanded by the plot. And some mysteries were satisfactorily resolved - only to make way for other and deeper mysteries. I am desperately hoping that all things will be come clear in the next book, and I hope that it will not be delayed!

Writing this review after a re-read having originally bought and read on initial publication. That first time round I bounced hard off the first 3/4's of the book, before a former protagonist showed up to take the novel from decent to exceptional. Unfortunately the same happened this time after a back to back re-read with Gideon.The central conceit of the first 3/4's is that Harrow is lost, confused, possibly mad, and with an edited memory in the world of the Emperor and His Lyctors - ancient humans who have lived 10,000 years and whom seem completely alien yet childishly human at the same time. Harrow spends most her time verbally and physically fencing with these characters, together with her fellow "baby" lyctor from the first novel. However it is interspersed with scenes that appear to be from an alternate version of the first book, as the group of would-be Lyctors are murdered 1 by 1 in Canaan House again. Except this time we are not sure whether its just Harrow's madness and grief at the loss of her love from the first book.For some reason I found these scenes tedious and because they talk to the mystery at the heart of this book, it makes the whole reading experience pall. It feels like a plot thread too many. A slimmer shorter book may gave been the way to go, as the last 1/4 when things start moving more rapidly as as good as the first.Its hard to say whether this book is disappointing because of the inevitable comparisons with Gideon the Ninth - which was a genuine Tour-de-force, or disappointing in its own right, bu regardless its cant quite match its forebear. Here's hoping the long wait til book 3 in 2022 is worth it.