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A review by nonesensed
The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Thara Celehar, the man who solved the murder of previous emperor, has been granted a gift of his own request from the current one: the opportunity to be a Witness for the Dead. It's not a glamours position, not even a well-respected one, but it's what Celehar feels he's meant to do. His calling to read and share the final thoughts of the dead truthfully comes before everything (sometimes to his own sorrow). In this book we follow along as Celehar gets involved in solving the mysterious death of a drowned woman, which is easier said than done when other work obligations and religious politics keep demanding his time and attention. Luckily he soon finds allies who'll help him - who hopefully won't turn out to be murderers.
This books was all I hoped for and more! Despite being a minor character in The Goblin Emperor, Celehar became one of my favorite characters, and when I heard he'd be the main character in the sequel I was both thrilled and apprehensive. When one falls in like with a minor character in a novel, one tends to extrapolate their full personality from the few scenes they have "on screen". I knew I had to brace for disappointment if it turned out the Celehar inside my head wasn't the same as the one inside the author's.
But it turns out Addison is excellent at conveying a character's personality in a fairly small number of scenes!
Celehar is very much the same dedicated, deductive (and depressed) detective from the first novel, only now we get to see things from his point of view. The pace of the story is also very much the same as that of the first novel, even though there's more clear "plot" in this sequel. Celehar is basically a mixture between a priest and psychic, but the story doesn't only focus on him solving mysteries and speaking to dead people - no, there's far more tension when he talks to the living!
I greatly enjoyed both the many conundrums Celehar had to deal with and getting a look inside his head simply to get to know him as a person. Celehar is very much a brooding, self-sacrificing loner type of main character, which makes it so delightful every time another character goes "hey, you seem pretty neat, wanna hang out?" I'm really hyped that this is going to be a trilogy and I can't wait for the next book!
If you enjoyed The Goblin Emperor and/or like to read character-focused mystery stories, I definitely recommend this book to you!
PS. Before reading this book, read The Goblin Emperor. While this is a stand alone story, focusing on Celehar instead of the previous main character Maia, if you're not familiar with the setting you'll be incredibly confused reading this, I promise. I don't just mean that you'll miss all the call-backs to The Goblin Emperor, you won't have the appendix. Which might sound like a minor problem seeing as this isn't a very long book. But you don't need the appendix for the characters, you need it for the made-up titles they all have that are based on a conlang of the author's making. If you want to be able to tell when someone's saying a character's name VS their title, pick up the first book in this setting, don't try to jump in here.
This books was all I hoped for and more! Despite being a minor character in The Goblin Emperor, Celehar became one of my favorite characters, and when I heard he'd be the main character in the sequel I was both thrilled and apprehensive. When one falls in like with a minor character in a novel, one tends to extrapolate their full personality from the few scenes they have "on screen". I knew I had to brace for disappointment if it turned out the Celehar inside my head wasn't the same as the one inside the author's.
But it turns out Addison is excellent at conveying a character's personality in a fairly small number of scenes!
Celehar is very much the same dedicated, deductive (and depressed) detective from the first novel, only now we get to see things from his point of view. The pace of the story is also very much the same as that of the first novel, even though there's more clear "plot" in this sequel. Celehar is basically a mixture between a priest and psychic, but the story doesn't only focus on him solving mysteries and speaking to dead people - no, there's far more tension when he talks to the living!
I greatly enjoyed both the many conundrums Celehar had to deal with and getting a look inside his head simply to get to know him as a person. Celehar is very much a brooding, self-sacrificing loner type of main character, which makes it so delightful every time another character goes "hey, you seem pretty neat, wanna hang out?" I'm really hyped that this is going to be a trilogy and I can't wait for the next book!
If you enjoyed The Goblin Emperor and/or like to read character-focused mystery stories, I definitely recommend this book to you!
PS. Before reading this book, read The Goblin Emperor. While this is a stand alone story, focusing on Celehar instead of the previous main character Maia, if you're not familiar with the setting you'll be incredibly confused reading this, I promise. I don't just mean that you'll miss all the call-backs to The Goblin Emperor, you won't have the appendix. Which might sound like a minor problem seeing as this isn't a very long book. But you don't need the appendix for the characters, you need it for the made-up titles they all have that are based on a conlang of the author's making. If you want to be able to tell when someone's saying a character's name VS their title, pick up the first book in this setting, don't try to jump in here.