I have attempted several passes at this review. They touch on the qualities of this particular book, but they then veer off into other topics. And in that veering, they feel woefully inadequate.

The book itself has at least six characters so well-drawn, interesting, and compelling that they make me viscerally angry. It has a plot which feels like a carefully-constructed thoroughly-British fair-play mystery of the first order, except that it simultaneously feels like said plot exists solely as a mannequin which the author drapes with hilarious jokes, questionable puns, and interesting anecdotes from the fictional city that he's built with such attention to detail that I sometimes consider Ankh-Morpork to be realer than, say, San Jose.

In conclusion, a brief story [a:Neil Gaiman|1221698|Neil Gaiman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1234150163p2/1221698.jpg] tells about [a:Terry Pratchett|1654|Terry Pratchett|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1235562205p2/1654.jpg], on his website:

One night, a year later, he finished a novel, with a hundred words still to go, so he put a piece of paper into his typewriter, and wrote a hundred words of the next novel.

Well, when I completed this novel, I just hit up the Discworld Reading Order Guide, found the next entry in the Watch novels ([b:Jingo|47990|Jingo (Discworld, #21; City Watch, #4)|Terry Pratchett|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327921813s/47990.jpg|1128623], for what it's worth), and read a hundred words of it.