You know that feeling where you're enjoying inhabiting a book so much you don't want to reach the end? This week I finished
The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison, and that's how I felt.
Witness is a companion novel to Addison's breakout novel, The Goblin Emperor (TGE), which I read for the first time last year and never got around to reviewing. You don't need to have read TGE to enjoy this one at all; Witness focuses on a minor character from TGE and his adventures after the events of that novel. Thara Celehar is a prelate of the god Ulis, and his role in elven society is something like a cross between a priest and a private detective. He has the ability to commune, in a limited fashion, with the dead, and he is employed by the city to provide this service to the people. This may involve reporting a deceased's last thoughts to a mourner, asking a deceased to clarify a point on their will, or seeking answers from a murder victim to bring their killer to justice.
Witness doesn't precisely employ a "case of the week" formula, but it does cover a few, sometimes overlapping, cases of Thara's with an ongoing murder investigation as the slow-burning thread tying the rest together.
Once again, Addison draws us into the complex politics of the realm she's created, and I do delight in that sort of thing. Thara tries very hard to avoid getting involved in anything that smacks of politics, but many more powerful players around him are keen to turn him into a political statement, forcing him to consider everything he does from about ten angles.
The murder investigation centers on a dead opera singer found early in the novel, and this allows Addison to dig into the artistic scene of the city of Amalo as well, which provides some very interesting worldbuilding opportunities. Hearing about how Amalo runs its art scene, what sorts of things they have chosen to commit to the stage, and what the reception to those things is tells us so much about this society. It's a perspective quite removed from TGE, where the focus was on the highest echelons of Ethuverez's nobility, and taken together gives us a relatively well-rounded look at Addison's world.
Thara makes for such an easy protagonist to root for. He's genuinely dedicated to his job, which he refers to as his calling, and always tries to do the right thing. This was a particularly refreshing perspective after my last audiobook, Sundial, and its cadre of people doing terrible things to each other all the time! He's soft-spoken, understated, and wants above all to do right by the trust that his clients place in him, and I loved following him around Amalo at work (I also really enjoyed the voice the narrator used for him).
The writing flows very well. Addison shifts to a first-person perspective here, which brings us more intimately both into Amalo and into Thara's work as he speaks directly to the reader about what he's doing. Addison has a talent for long, graceful sentences that provide wonderfully vivid looks at the characters around her protagonist. Listening to them all unfold was great entertainment!
As I was drawing near the end, I tried to articulate what it was about Witness and TGE's world I found so pleasant to engage with, and I think it's the sense that Addison's narrative rewards goodness. I mentioned above how hard Thara works to do the right thing, to be patient, to be kind, to stay out of power politics—and as with Maia in TGE, it feels that in some small ways, he is rewarded for that effort. Or at the least, he isn't punished for it. On a shelf full of edgy dark fantasy where cynicism is survival (and I enjoy those too!), it was comforting to inhabit a story where, for the most part, I did not expect Thara's kindness to be repaid with a knife in the back. He may miss out on some things-- as a dedicated prelate trying to stay off the political scene, he lives in relative poverty and has few resources at his disposal, and his political dodging mean he has few powerful allies on his side—but he chooses to accept this and is content with the ability to pursue his calling.
On the whole, I really enjoyed
The Witness for the Dead, and I do plan to read the other two books in this series. I may pick up a hard copy of this to go with my TGE copy. Well done Ms. Addison!
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reeby10) wrote2025-07-06 08:46 pm
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