The ancient nine

"Collins thinks his life at Harvard will be all about basketball and pre-med; hard workouts and grinding work in class. The friends he's made when he hits the storied ivy-clad campus from a very different life in urban Chicago are a happy bonus. But Spencer is about to be introduced to the most mysterious inner sanctum of the inner sanctum: to his surprise, he's in the running to be "punched" for one of Harvard's elite final clubs. The Delphic Club is known as "the Gas" for its crest of three gas-lit flames, and as Spencer is considered for membership, he's plunged not only into the secret world of male privilege that the Gas represents, but also into a century-old club mystery. Because at the heart of the Delphic, secured deep inside its guarded mansion club, is another secret society: a shadowy group of powerful men known as The Ancient Nine."--

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Book

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416 pages :

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Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
Fiction	F/SMITH/ANCIE	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

"Pulls you into the depths of a secret world from the first page. Ian Smith's novel is unmissable." --Harlan Coben, author of Missing You

Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fall 1988

Spenser Collins
An unlikely Harvard prospect, smart and athletic, strapped for cash, determined to succeed. Calls his mother--who raised him on her own in Chicago--every week.

Dalton Winthrop
A white-shoe legacy at Harvard, he's just the most recent in a string of moneyed, privileged Winthrop men in Cambridge. He's got the ease--and the deep knowledge--that come from belonging.

These two find enough common ground to become friends, cementing their bond when Spenser is "punched" to join the Delphic Club, one of the most exclusive of Harvard's famous all-male final clubs. Founded in the nineteenth century, the Delphic has had titans of industry, Hollywood legends, heads of state, and power brokers among its members.

Dalton Winthrop knows firsthand that the Delphic doesn't offer memberships to just anyone. His great-uncle is one of their oldest living members, and Dalton grew up on stories of the club's rituals. But why is his uncle so cryptic about the Ancient Nine, a shadowy group of alums whose identities are unknown and whose power is absolute? They protect the Delphic's darkest and oldest secrets--including what happened to a student who sneaked into the club's stately brick mansion in 1927 and was never seen again.

Dalton steers Spenser into deeper and deeper recesses of the club, and beyond, to try to make sense of what they think they may be seeing. But with each scrap of information they get from an octogenarian Crimson graduate, a crumbling newspaper in the library's archives, or one of Harvard's most famous and heavily guarded historical books, a fresh complication trips them up. The more the friends investigate, the more questions they unearth, tangling the story of the club, the disappearance, and the Ancient Nine, until they realize their own lives are in danger.

Author Notes

Ian K. Smith is the author of New York Times bestselling nonfiction books, including the #1 bestsellers Shred, Super Shred , and Blast the Sugar Out , as well as the novel The Blackbird Papers. He is a graduate of Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In 1988, Harvard undergrad Spenser Collins, the narrator of this enticing if formulaic thriller from bestseller Smith (The Blackbird Papers), is invited to a reception given by the Delphic Club, the "most secretive of Harvard's nine most exclusive clubs," whose membership includes "some of the world's most prominent men." Intrigued, Spenser researches the club's past and learns that a Harvard student, Erasmus Abbott, vanished in 1927 after attempting to break into the Delphic Club. Spenser decides to investigate, and the path to the truth, of course, proves perilous. Meanwhile, Spenser strikes up a romance with a stunning community college student, Ashley Garrett, who works as a server in his dining hall. Ashley, who turns out to be brilliant but oddly dreams of a career as a wedding planner, initially dismisses the notion of dating a snobby Harvard man before their relationship arrives at a predictable destination. Those seeking an inside look at an Ivy League secret society will get their money's worth. 75,000 announced first printing. Author tour. Agent: Mitch Hoffman, Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Smith, the author of several diet books and one previous novel (The Blackbird Papers, 2004), turns again to fiction. Set in the late 1980s, the story concerns a Harvard student, Spenser Collins, who has been selected by the prestigious Delphic Club as a possible new member. When Spenser gets wind of a mystery buried in the club's dark past, he becomes determined to get to the truth behind the (possibly apocryphal) story of the Ancient Nine, a group of Delphic members who guard a centuries-old secret. Although the writing ranges from solid to barely adequate, sometimes within a single paragraph, the story, with its Dan Brown-like hooks, should be enough to keep readers involved. Curiously, the text asks readers to judge for themselves whether the plot is based on real events or is entirely the product of the author's fertile imagination.--David Pitt Copyright 2018 Booklist

Library Journal Review

In 1988, Spenser Collins, an African American premed student and athlete from Chicago, is nominated for induction into one of Harvard's most prestigious social clubs. The Delphic, riddled with tradition and home to power brokers and industry moguls, is looking to recruit fresh (blue) blood. While swimming with the sharks among the one percent, Spenser and his friend uncover the Ancient Nine, a hidden inner circle within the club who hold their secrets close, including a death on campus in the 1920s that kickstarts the story. Not an intense thriller, nor a puzzling mystery, Smith's second novel (after The Blackbird Papers) is best when describing the campus atmosphere and daily life of an undergrad at Harvard, where the author was a student, a place he renders lovingly. VERDICT There's some meat here for readers of mysteries set in academia and political thrillers, but they'll likely want more. For a similar feel, try Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's The Rule of Four, a campus novel with a bit more danger and pulp and far more puzzles.-Gregg Winsor, Johnson Cty. Lib., Overland Park, KS © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.