I quite enjoyed this, the story moves along, it's varied and intricately drawn with gritty details. I felt at times like i was reading Dashiell Hammett, but with ghouls and elves and goblins. i think some of the subtleties of the world Addison creates were lost on me because i haven't read the Goblin Emperor. (can't say i wasn't warned.) I liked the names and titles of the characters; they have a nice musical ring to them, but again, i felt a like i was in the deep end of the pool trying to keep all of them straight in my mind. I think it'd be worth reading again this after i read the GE.
Review of 'The Witness for the Dead' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
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 …
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 …
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.
