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.

Ya habíamos conocido al personaje central en The Goblin Emperor. Algo triste y solitario, también va con su oficio de Testigo de los Muertos. Es que en ese mundo hay Testigos que hablan por los que no tienen voz. No es el énfasis que le dan, pero se parece a los derechos de la Pacha Mama, creo, y creo que se menciona que a veces hay un Testigo que toma la voz de un río o de un monte.

Para ser Testigo de los Muertos debes tener el llamado, y con suerte tendrás el Talento. El talento te permite "ver" un poquito, sentir las últimas impresiones de lo que queda de las almas en los cuerpos. Además te entrena la orden monacal de los testigos, y adquieres el superpoder de la escucha profunda.

Los Testigos de los Muertos buscan la Verdad, que no siempre es lo que más conviene.

Ciertamente no le conviene a los asesinos que la verdad de sus crímenes se conozca. De ahí los nudos trenzados de esta historia. Con un par de aventuras y peripecias distractoras por ahí enmedio, emocionantes y terroríficas.

Buena lectura de fantasía, recomendable para el otoño.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from another book set in The Goblin Emperor universe, but I really enjoyed this fantasy slice of life cozy mystery. This is not a sequel per se and I don't strictly think you need to have read the previous book to enjoy this one, but I do think coming to this one knowing the naming conventions and a little bit of backstory make this book easier and more enjoyable to read.

It was also fun to have read this after reading Paladin's Hope (by T. Kingfisher), which similarly features a main character who is able to see a body's last moments before death. Plot-wise, it's definitely a useful mystery hook to have an amateur investigator (and also thankfully not a cop) have some insight into tracking down nefarious deeds. The similarities end there, as Paladin's Hope has a more ...action and romance bent to it, and this book is more about religious duty and local community. (I think I expected that book to have more of the feel that this one did and was surprised where that one went. But that's neither here nor there.)

I think my biggest joy with this book was just the extra worldbuilding and cultural details. The Goblin Emperor is (understandably) focused on Maia who is insulated from the rest of the world, and so the book focuses more on his feelings and court politics. There's still plenty about Celehar's feelings and local politics here as well, but there's a lot more space to see the world itself. It was fun to have such a different locale here where we get to see coin-powered gas meters, teahouses, burial practices, local religious politics, airship manufactories, etc.

I really enjoyed this a lot, even if it had a very different feel from The Goblin Emperor. I do love a good mystery though, and this delivered.

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.

This was one of those books that when it ended, I missed getting to be in the world. It has a kind of understated, slice-of-life feel, with a lot of detail and reverence paid to the minutia of daily life and community relationships, that felt more prominent to me than the murder mysteries. Addison writes with an immense amout of compassion and tenderness, and for me that is what makes this book, and The Goblin Emperor, transcend what they would be on their face, in terms of plot.

The writing style drops you into the cultural nuances of the society largely without explanation, and you can infer, for example, what different honorifics mean through context. I really really like this and I think overall its very well done, but I think it would be more daunting if I hadn't already read The Goblin Emperor, and there were some points at which I needed a little help. Specifically, I found the sexual mores confusing, and it was important to the plot that they make sense.

I would highly recommend this if you read and liked The Goblin Emperor, but I'd be more cautious to recommend it if you haven't, even though it's not a sequel per say.