A review by skycrane
The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

5.0

I liked The Goblin Emperor, but I didn't love it. This book I did love. Much of the book is about a murder mystery, but it's broader than that, a portrait of a man's life with particular focus on the place he lives in. Celehar (a relatively minor character in The Goblin Emperor) is a Witness for the Dead, a sort of religio-judicial position. He can commune with the souls of the dead, and his position in the city of Amalo has him available for petitioners to make requests of. He verifies wills, identifies bodies, and investigates suspicious deaths. And all that is very interesting, but what really elevated this book for me was the way it brought me into his life. You really get a sense for who Celehar is, what drives him, the regrets never far from his mind and the hopes he doesn't dare even acknowledge. And on top of that, the portrait of the city itself is just beautifully intricate. The author describes directions and locations in detail many times, so much that I could picture the mixture of modern broad boulevards with their tram lines and old narrow lanes meeting at odd angles much better than if the book had instead included a map. Amalo is a city in the midst of a change. The nobility have fled to the countryside, replaced by merchants and industrialists. The poor work in vast dirty, dangerous factories. The city's government by confused and overlapping jurisdictions of court bureaucrats, administrative officials, and religious orders is never explained, but expertly conveyed by the complex way the characters move through it. That's what's great about this book. It brings its characters and world to life not by explaining them, but by fully immersing the reader in them.