This was an enjoyable, pleasant book to read (especially considering it’s a murder mystery). It’s a return to the world of The Goblin Emperor (Maia doesn’t appear, but is mentioned), starring a minor character from The Goblin Emperor, and taking place far from the machinations and intrigues of the Imperial palace. It had the feel of a sequel to The Goblin Emperor, hitting that same kind of “the world isn’t necessarily great but as long as good people are doing their best it’ll be ok” vibe. (Having just read a Becky Chambers book, it’s that kind of feeling.) What it doesn’t quite have is that something (whatever it was) that made The Goblin Emperor such a perfect little book, though I’m happy to say it’s got at least something of it.
The protagonist of this book is Thara Celehar, the Witness for the Dead who was able to help find out who had killed Maia’s father and half-brothers. He has since left the Imperial palace and moved to a distant city, where his calling leads to him serving as a Witness for an unknown Elven woman who had been murdered and dumped in the river. He is able to glimpse her last moments, and it’s his responsibility to find out what happened to her.
I called this a murder mystery, and it is one, but it’s not really about the murder. This is about Thara as a person. The central mystery is the vehicle by which we learn about him. By the end of the story, I found I wasn’t nearly as interested to learn who the killer was as I was to learn how Thara felt about it.
Along the way he deals with some other cases of varying degrees of importance to both Thara and the reader. And this is where I think the book really does measure up in some degree to *The Goblin Emperor*. A number of those stories just … don’t really go anywhere. There’s not really a resolution to them. In some cases I don’t think I could tell you what the point of them was. But I didn’t mind, because they were each a vehicle to let us see more of our protagonist. The unifying thing in all these events is that we get to see more and more of how other people see our protagonist, though we’re doing so through Thara’s eyes. I’m sorry for how confusing that sentence ended up being, but it’s the best I can do.
I will mention that the names are every bit as confusing in this book as in The Goblin Emperor.
In the end (my feelings on this book have settled by the act of writing this review), I’d say that though The Witness for the Dead isn’t as good as The Goblin Emperor, it’s still a worthy sequel.