The Witness for the Dead

This book is a return to the world of The Goblin Emperor, which I quite liked. It's an indirect sequel, set after the events in the first book, but pretty much unrelated otherwise. Its protagonist is Thara Celehar, the Witness for the Dead who helped Maia previously. He is now posted in the city of Amalo, a political backwater, which is fine for Thara. He tries to do his job, and much of the book is spent in his investigations on the death of an opera singer. But he also gets swept up in political intrigues, has to go fight undead, and drinks a lot of tea.

I must admit that at times my attention strayed. The plot is very meandering, it just piddles along, and I like myself a tighter narrative. Thara remained a bit bland. Addison likes to drown the reader in all the terms specific to her world, and I found that a bit tedious at times. But it was overall quite good, just not great.

I loved The Goblin Emperor so much that I didn't want to seek out Witness for the Dead - who knows when Addison will write another book in this world, I have to make it last - so I waited until I happened to come across it on the shelf at the library, which finally happened.

I don't know that I would say it's better than The Goblin Emperor - for one thing, TGE is a better entry point because Maia knows nothing about court and the reader learns along with him, where Celehar in WftD is in a world he knows intimately - but in some ways it hangs together better. This is a murder mystery, and an exploration of the outer edges of Maia's kingdom; there are no huge plots to uncover, no questions of "what makes a good king?" and so on. The worldbuilding calms down here in a way that's very satisfying to a reader of TGE, too.

As Witness for the Dead, Celehar's job is to commune with recently-deceased bodies to hear what they can still remember of their deaths or their concerns, which helps solve disputes and clear up confusion (and his job is also also to put down ghouls, bodies that rise from the dead when their graves aren't kept up or properly marked). This puts him in the middle of local religious politics, family drama, and murder. The main murder of the story is a young mezzo found clubbed on the head and left in the water, which Celehar is trying to solve, clue by clue; there's also a woman enticed away from her family and poisoned, which points Celehar to look for a serial wife murderer.

My main issue with TGE was that the pacing of the plot was awkward, with the exciting action sequence that felt like the climax happening near the midpoint, and of course those niggling questions about how despite the fact that Maia is the lovable good boy and underdog, he's kind of ... conservative, isn't he? And WftD has a similar problem: the most exciting part, dealing with the ghoul, happens at the midpoint of the book, and everything else is fairly calm, with no real rising intensity. I was actually okay with that until the seemingly unrelated plot threads resolved rather suddenly in the last few pages. In some ways, this book is more like literary fiction than genre mystery, which relies on a particular formula of increasing danger and clue-finding, but it didn't quite stick the landing.

More particularly, I had an issue with the central mystery - the murdered mezzo. The picture Celehar finds drawn of her through all of the interviews he does with her colleagues and acquaintances is not very nuanced. She was a bitchy, demanding leech who was only liked by pathetic backstagers who were absolutely zero threat to her. I kept waiting for him to find out that there was more to her and make some sort of thematic point, but she was never more than a macguffin to drive a mystery for Celehar to solve. None of the mysteries seem to have much of a thematic point, unfortunately.

Minorly spoilery, but I did love that Celehar gets to find people who aren't so fussed about being marnis, and is set up to have a healthy, loving romantic relationship once he finishes dealing with his issues over causing Evru's death. And really, that's the most important thing.