2023/072: The Grief of Stones — Katherine Addison

It was probably the emperor who had saved my life, by giving me a purpose, a task, a question to answer. And then Ulis had spoken to me in a dream, and I had known that my calling had not been taken from me. After that there was no question of suicide, not if my god still needed my work. But I remembered what it had felt like. [loc. 808]

In which Thana Celehar acquires an apprentice (the widow Tomasaran, untrained and ignorant, whose first experience of communing with the recently-departed was over her husband's bier), faces a fearsome revenant, and investigates a case of child pornography. I didn't like this one quite as much as The Witness for the Dead, but that may simply be because I read it immediately after finishing Witness, and the edges got blurred. Or it may be that the story is darker, with its focus on female foundlings and the dearth of options for them. Or it may be that, at the end of this novel, Celehar is not the person he was at the beginning -- and while there is talk of 'an assignment that is uniquely suited to your abilities', no further detail is available at this time. (The author says she's hoping for a summer 2024 release for the concluding volume of the trilogy.)

There is a great deal to enjoy here, though. The underside of polite Amaro society, with louche photographers and a plethora of tea-houses; the fact that many of the characters live in some degree of poverty; the opera (the title of the novel comes from Pel-Thenhior's latest composition, 'based on a Barizheise novel about a lighthouse keeper and his family and the tragedies that befall them after the wreck of the Grief of Stones on their rocks'); the coexistence of elves and goblins, and their cultural idiosyncrasies (ear-position is a frequent indicator of mood or opinion); the cats that Celehar feeds but won't claim as his own ... The plot, with its several entwined mysteries, is interesting and well-paced, but the world-building and the characterisation is what kept me reading, and inclines me to preorder the next book as soon as it's available.