It's the purest coincidence that I picked up 'The Grief of Stones' immediately after reading 'Speaker for the Dead', the second book in Orson Scott Card's 'Enderverse', as part of my runthrough of winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, but it was clearly a massive influence on Katherine Addison, as its lead character, Thara Celehar, has precisely the same job as Ender Wiggin. Sure, he's called a Witness for the Dead rather than a Speaker for the Dead, but it's fundamentally the same.

Fortunately, this novel goes in a very different direction otherwise and it took me a while to put all the pieces together to figure out where, because this is genre-hopping stuff indeed.

It's a fantasy novel, first and foremost, set in a fictional fantasy world where elves and goblins live and work and play alongside humans. However, this angle isn't particularly explored. I turned the final page with little more understanding of the social dynamics of this world than when I started it. Maybe elves are seen as a higher class than goblins, if the opera is seen as high class entertainment in this world as well as ours, but I'm not convinced. Does it matter that goblins meditate but humans don't? I haven't a clue. Do dropped ears have social importance? No idea.

The core of the novel is a mystery, one that starts out with a cozy mindset (if kicking off a book with an execution doesn't disqualify it from that genre) but escalates until we realise that we're in a film noir, albeit not a hardboiled detective story. Thara Celehar is more of a Columbo than a Philip Marlowe, and the stature of his office lends him a Brother Cadfael vibe. He seems to be a monk, but one who wanders the city and talks to anyone. He's a quiet detective but a dogged one, even when his investigation gets gritty, very much like neo-noir.

There's a supernatural element too that's initially relatively subdued; Celehar is not elected but called to his station because of a special talent. It's a sort of mild necromancy, in which he obtains information of importance from the recently deceased, maybe a name or an impression or their final moments, which will hopefully be enough to settle a case. Of course, any similarities with Anita Blake end there, as this is a formal world that adheres to societal etiquette rather than a sassy one drenched in bodily fluids of various types. The supernatural element escalates late on, with a sort of side quest, and I expect is very important in the broader world this book inhabits.

It's also a novel whose worldbuilding plays with our expectations, especially when it comes to language and custom, in a very deliberate way that makes me see this as quietly subversive. I struggled with the names for a long while, not just because they tend to be long and cumbersome—hello, Dach'osmerrem Cambersharan—but because I didn't initially grasp that they included titles. Thus, Thara Celehar is also Othala Celehar, where Othala is his official title. I initially thought that Othala and other commonplace names like Osmin and Merram must be family names, merely placed first, as many Asian cultures have a tendency to do. But no, they're titles and they're used frequently in conversation.

It's worth noting also that suffices change according to gender, as they do in gendered languages in our world, but in the opposite way to what we might expect. Othala, for instance, is masculine, so Thara Celehar is male, but Othalo is feminine and Othalei plural. Without much in the way of description here to guide me, I made assumptions and most of them were wrong. While many of the languages that I'm peripherally aware of use -o as a masculine suffix and -a as a female one, that's opposite here. Velniro is female. Keila is male. The Marquess Ulzhavel is male, while his wife, the late Marquise, was female.

To be fair, it may well be that my struggles, especially early on, are at least in part because this is not a standalone novel. This is the second book in 'The Cemeteries of Amalo' series, focused on Thara Celehar, and I haven't read the first one, 'Witness for the Dead'. These are also the second and third in a series named 'The Goblin Emperor' after its first volume. I picked up a lot of detail as this one progressed, so I have glimpses of ideas of what those books are about. He witnessed for an emperor, maybe in that first book, and is stationed in this particular city for high political reasons. Do those things matter? Not this time out, but presumably they will on a grander scale.

So don't ditch this because it sounds confusing. Start it as you should, with book one, and I'd be shocked if you weren't far more quickly at home with the titles and the suffices and the shifts into highly formal Shakespearean language for official duties, full of thees and thous and dosts. And, far later than I have any reason to point out, Thara Celehar's official duties are just like Ender Wiggin's, to be called (in this world, petitioned) to speak (witness) for someone who has died; the societal importance of that task is a get-into-anywhere pass to be able to investigate properly. Here, there's a greater value given to actual endings, in the resolution sense of a mystery, but it's fundamentally still about truth.

And, while Othala Celehar is initially petitioned to investigate the death of Marquise Tomilo Ulzhavel, a job we expect to take up the whole novel, that's resolved less than a third of the way in, merely in a way that sparks a further investigation and that expands to fill the whole novel. Also, as witnessing for the dead is a sacred duty, any valid petition must be accepted, so Celehar and his surprise new apprentice, Velhiro Tomasin, not to forget his fascinating and highly unofficial sidekick, Pel-Thenhior, end up with a variety of shorter cases to solve, some of which are blissful. I'm sure that everyone's favourite has to be the quest to recover a recipe for scones otherwise lost with the death of its master. That one's joyous.

I may not be doing a good job of getting the right impression across, because the component parts are not ones that would seem to leap out and grab people. The investigative angle is quiet and mostly done to a strict set of rules. The lead character is almost infuriatingly calm and polite. The language is formal at the best of times and highly formal when it needs to be. The names are awkward and the suffices and titles are confusing. The genre isn't easily quantifiable. You may well read this paragraph and think, no, this is certainly not for me, and I'd like to counter that right here and now.

I had an absolute blast with 'The Grief of Stones'. It's unlike anything I've read before and I tend to be a big fan of those rare fantasies that aren't obvious homages to the pioneers of the genre. Sure, there's a clear list of influences that anyone well versed in culture will acknowledge, but they tend to influence a single angle of this book rather than the whole thing. Even an elevator pitch would get complex: it's a sort of Columbo in Chinatown, except that he's doing Ender Wiggin's job in a three-part episode that's going to end in a crossover. Oh, and Chinatown is clad in fantasy clothes with a side of religious politics and it all ends with a side quest into Dungeons and Dragons territory. Yeah, that's unwieldy, huh?

I'm eager to work backwards and find out what happened in 'The Witness for the Dead', published last year. I'm less concerned about 'The Goblin Emperor', which came out in 2014, because I believe the tone would be very different in that one. I'm especially intrigued about 'The Tomb of Dragons', which will be the third Thara Celehar book in 'The Cemeteries of Amalo', hopefully coming soon. Oh, and Katherine Addison is a pseudonym of Sarah Monette, who wrote another fantasy series, 'Doctrine of Labyrinths', along with a collaboration with Elizabeth Bear called 'Iskryne World'. I wonder if her voice is different in those books. I am very tempted to find out. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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