The Witness for the Dead

The Witness for the Dead, by Katherine Addison

Almost all the reading I've done this spring has been re-reading older books. This is why the lack of new posts on the Bookshelf: I don't need two posts for all the books in Novik's Scholomance series or Tesh's SOME DESPERATE GLORY. One of my closest friends died in March, and it's been difficult to focus on fiction, so I've been re-reading old favorites that don't require much from me, and which I can rely on not to press too hard on the bruise. I've also been working on a quilt, and therefore listening to audiobooks so I can multitask, and the audiobook of THE GOBLIN EMPEROR is a tidy 18 hours long, so that felt like a great combo of quilting and rereading.

THE WITNESS FOR THE DEAD is not very like the THE GOBLIN EMPEROR, and I think I actually prefer it in almost every way. Although I like EMPEROR also, TWFTD is clearer, more intricately plotted, and has more authentic characters, all differences that I felt were amplified when listening to both back to back, since I was unable to skim. The emperor and the detective are quite similar people in many ways: sad gentle men with traumatic histories that have made them skittish, especially of romance, and given them horrifically low self-esteem, but who try over everything to be good. But the detective is older, more complex, and his goodness felt more plausible to me because it was hard won.

The plot of TWFTD is meandering and low stakes, almost day-in-the-life, although a series of days in the life of a Witness for the Dead isn't exactly an ordinary slice-of-life story. Multiple disparate murders end up connected in unpredictable ways, with a resolution that is low-key but authentic. Addison aims to evoke not the crashing cannons of an operatic adventure but the quite, solid satisfaction of hard work well done, and she's very successful. I'm into it. And it's a lovely story to read while in the middle of grief.