@rikefranke I like spending time with Thara Celehar in Katherine Addison’s books (#TheGoblinEmperor, then #TheWitnessForTheDead and so on) and the audio books are very good.
If you’ve not already encountered them (relevant to your interests?) the #Murderbot series by @marthawells are excellent and also have very good audiobooks.
Finally, @AnnLeckie books are great and have lovely audiobook adaptations.

Not the kind of fantasy novel I thought I'd like, but this is great stuff.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41302953-the-witness-for-the-dead

the "predecessor" book The Goblin Emperor also pretty good, though this not exactly a sequel as it expands on the experience of a minor character in the first book.

#TheWitnessfortheDead
#KatherineAddison

> "Drink thy tea, Celehar," I said impatiently to myself, "and cease repining."

reading and loving: The Witness For The Dead.

When I stumbled on the fact that Goblin Emperor had a sequel, I knew Monette would take it in a direction I didn't expect, but a detective novel really blindsided me. MC is from an order of clerics able to see the fading thoughts of fresh corpses. They solve crimes.

Goblin Emperor is a real feat, an exquisitely intricate court politics gossip-jostling of a fantasy novel where the action duels are done with sassy turns of phrase, yet it's clear and thrilling enough to be considered YA, and the MC survives, eventually revolutionises, all the cynicism and elaborate backstabbing of the nest of vipers by virtue of being a kind and gentle :goodboy: who actually cares about others. Also a goblin.

The Witness For the Dead twists the approach; Thara Celehar is elvish (=white), blunt like a brick, classicaly hard-boiled, very gay, and very, very tired. He feels like three times his age, yet as we see Et'uverazian working classes for the first time through him, he never fails to warm your heart in the same way that Maia did, reminding you that people can be good actually. (Even when they're grumpy. You'd be grumpy too in his place. He dreams the dreams of ghosts, and his boyfriend is dead.)

Monette has a lot of fun with genres in this one; while GE is 100% courtly intrigue here we have procedural, steampunk, horror, opera drama flipping though like channels, and I really admire that the tropes are engaged in a 100% sincere, wholehearted way. Also there's this thing with a mustard yellow cloak that's just, ok spoilers, but it's absolutely hilarious. What I like the most is how the thick formalism and rigid hierarchies we saw in GE are still around, interacting with general society in interesting ways. Celehar is good and kind in a way that his funereal disposition belies, and it's cathartic to share in his seething contempt for the politics of power, but he's not immune to class and race prejudice either, so there's a lot of social issues you read between the lines, in what his assumptions imply. Monette repeats the impressive feat of linguistic necromancy that she pulled off in GE: everybody speak in "you" for formality, first-person "we/you" for extra courtesy along with complex titles, so that by the time way deep in the novel that there's an informal scene for a change and they drop to I/thou, thee/thou pronouns _feel_ intimate and casual again.

And yeah we get more Et'uveraz—sorry I'll write in the way Monette originally intended, diacritics make complete philological sense here fuck the editors—but I'm not sure we can see much more of the language, it's hard to tell in audiobook format but it feels like GE's setting lend itself off a lot more to contextualised language samples. I was obviously hoping that the sequel would be set in Bariz'an, but it's still elvenlands and at least as far as I've read of it, I don't think we're getting much Bariz'eise out of this one. Oh well, at least the audiobook narrator doesn't botch the Et'uverazian aspirates (the narrator does a growling voice for Ot'ala Celehar's dialogue, but clears it for his inner first-person narration; I wish the whole thing was growly through and through).

For a while now I've been pondering about my love for detective novels, and how they could be rescued from their roots as union-busting copaganda (read on the Pinkertons for more on this). The premise of an investigator uncovering secret harm doesn't have to buy into the values of punitive justice or the prison system, and the classic detective doesn't have to be a cop, it can punch up too, it can centre the needs of the harmed too (a lot of good comics in the genre are about journalists, for ex.). Celehar isn't a priest just as a fantasy reskin for Philip Marlowe. He has a calling, he's been touched by the numinous, and vulnerable though he is (physically and socially), he'll fight tooth and nail for those who come desperate for aid, on conviction alone when all hope fails—because it is the right thing to do; the moral strenght of the Chandlerian detective makes perfect sense, more sense even, for a cleric. This also brings a sense of solidarity into it; you never get the sense that Celehar is into it to punish or outsmart evildoers, he witness for the dead because someone ought to.

(Images are from tumblr fandom)

#bookReview #TheGoblinEmperor #TheWitnessForTheDead