Gideon the Ninth

Gideon the Ninth is a locked-house mystery that keeps handing the keys to people who hate each other.

I enjoyed Tamsyn Muir's first Locked Tomb book most when I stopped asking it to behave. It arrives wearing skull paint, carrying a sword, and making jokes at the precise moment a more decorous novel would lower its voice. Some of those jokes made me groan. Several made me laugh despite myself. Then, without changing costume, the book made me care terribly about who was allowed to trust whom.

This is a demanding read disguised as a swaggering one. I had to reread a few pages to sort a new title from a new person, and I am glad I did. The reward is not a tidy world explained for visitors. It is the peculiar intimacy of being trapped in a room with characters who know more than you and dislike discussing it.

The premise (no spoilers past the arrival at the First House)

Published in 2019, Gideon the Ninth opens The Locked Tomb series. Gideon Nav, raised in servitude at the Ninth House, wants out. Harrowhark Nonagesimus, heir to that house and a formidable necromancer, needs Gideon's skill with a sword. The Emperor has summoned the heirs of the houses and their cavaliers to compete for a prize bound up with power and immortality. Gideon goes with Harrow to the First House, where an ageing, elaborate residence brings the parties together. That is the early bargain and the early stage. I would leave the rest locked.

Muir makes the setting do two jobs at once. Its decayed grandeur promises a puzzle, while its gathering of competing specialists ensures that every conversation is also a contest over status. Gideon would prefer a straight answer and perhaps a chair that is not haunted by history. She gets neither. I sympathised with her more than I expected.

What works

The point of view is the engine. Gideon is funny because she refuses to grant ceremony the respect it demands, but the same resistance creates a productive blind spot. We experience the world through someone who can read a physical threat faster than a ritual or a political one. That means Muir can seed information in plain sight while letting the narrator dismiss it. A second read would surely make me feel both clever and personally insulted.

The prose has a wild range. One paragraph can be thick with religious dread; the next can land a joke with the manners of a thrown boot. This mix ought to collapse under its own self-consciousness. Often it does not, because Gideon's humour has a use: it is how she keeps horror and humiliation at a manageable distance. The laughs are not all equally good, but the voice has enough pressure behind it to survive a bad one.

I especially admire the structural patience. The house mystery gives the novel a physical shape when its vocabulary threatens to spill over the edges. We may not understand every institution immediately, but we know who is in the building, what they claim to want, and why the closed spaces matter. Muir makes the reader work, then gives that work a pulse. I found myself tracking alliances almost against my will.

There is also a lovely nastiness in the book's treatment of dependence. A cavalier and a necromancer must function as a pair, yet the people at the centre of this pair have spent their lives making mutual understanding look impossible. The tension is not created by withholding one obvious conversation. It is built into the way each understands service, freedom and debt. That is much more interesting than a neat progression from insults to affection.

What's polarising

The proper nouns come in a procession, and the first stretch can feel like being introduced to an entire funeral by someone who mumbles. If you need immediate command of a fantasy hierarchy, you may bounce before the mystery settles into focus. Muir also enjoys an abrupt modern joke inside solemn gothic scenery. I liked the voltage of that clash, but not every punchline earned its place. One or two felt as though they had wandered into the wrong wake.

The much-advertised relational charge should not be mistaken for a conventional romance arc. Readers expecting a steady series of courtship beats will be waiting beside an empty dance floor. The book is stranger, harsher and more interested in power than that. It also turns darker than its opening banter suggests. I would give a friend that warning before lending it, especially a friend drawn in by the comic swagger.

The Gideon of it

Gideon Nav is not compelling because she is invulnerable. She is compelling because her bravado has a visible cost. Muir lets her be crude, brave, bored and perceptive in uneven proportions. When Gideon fails to understand a room, the gap tells us as much about what she has been denied as it does about what she has missed. The sword gives her a job; the narration gives her an interior life that resists being reduced to the job.

Her antagonism with Harrow is the novel's best pressure point. I do not need to assign it a tidy label to feel its force. Their exchanges can be funny, punishing and unexpectedly attentive. The strongest passages make me ask who has been permitted to need someone, and who would rather take another wound than admit it. If your favourite relationship stories are about trust arriving late and badly dressed, there is plenty here.

Spice and heat

Heat: 1 of 5 as a broad romance rating, with no open door scene. This is not where to look for a high-heat love story, or even a reassuring one. The charged material is emotional and adversarial. Expect death, body horror, coercive systems and an atmosphere that grows much less playful as the mystery tightens. The jokes are a coping mechanism, not a promise of safety.

Who it's for

You should read it if you like gothic architecture, difficult alliances and narrators who treat solemnity as a personal enemy. Bring patience for names and a taste for puzzles that will not hand you a glossary before breakfast. If you want the emotional clarity of a traditional fantasy romance, borrow something else tonight. If you want to be baffled, amused and then unexpectedly hurt by the same book, welcome to the Ninth House. There is probably paperwork.

Books like Gideon the Ninth

• The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling, for a claustrophobic bond sharpened by danger and incomplete trust.
• The Unspoken Name by A. K. Larkwood, for a young woman escaping a prescribed death into a larger, stranger fantasy world.
• The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart, for imperial power built on unsettling magic and people trying to live under it.

Starling is the nearest match for psychological confinement, though her dark spaces are very different. Larkwood gives you more outward movement and a quieter emotional register. Stewart is the pick for readers who most enjoyed tracing the rules behind the necromancy. I would not promise any of them Gideon's voice. It is an especially difficult voice to lend out.

Finished the book and not ready to leave? Gideon Nav is waiting on Fictora.

Talk to Gideon Nav