Bingo 10: Questions
One main question of the Thara Celehar novellas is “who dunnit?’ as well as ‘why’, and that’s true of The Grief of Stones too, but also, there’s a bit of a twist about 2/3 of the way through which also adds “what will {x} do now?”
Being a Witness for the Dead, someone who can see the final thoughts or images of someone who has died, it makes sense that Celehar would be involved in solving murders, as he is here, but there also a bit more to that. He’s also suddenly assigned an apprentice which means that he has to answer her questions too about the job and the calling. Then there’s the question of when is he going to have an open chat with Ianna about the two of them. Neither one of them seems to be able to bring up what they are to each other, and it’s obviously friends but maybe a hint something else too.
Interestingly the first death Celehar can resolve seems pretty straightforward: suicide. But then the next one is less so, and it’s the possible murder of the marquise that leads Celehar into all the adventure that follows, and a few more deaths that may or may not be connected. As you might expect of a who-dunnit, one murder leads to the discovery of another as well as other illegal goings on, and eventually things get connected, but not before the detective has to face something dangerous. That encounter leads to a situation for Celehar in which he has to wonder and maybe start to work out two big things, both personal but one pretty private and the other less so. The private thing ends up getting connected to a tragedy revealed in the original The Goblin Emperor (where Celehar is a side character) and pertains directly to the title of the novella.
This leads me to a final question of my own that came up a couple of times: who is this character? There are a lot of names and individual characters in this novella, and some from previous stories as well; if you don’t know who someone is, then there might be a problem. You might be able to get the basic whodunnit plot without having read the previous two books before this one, but you would be missing a lot of the side references like to Everu (from the first novel) or even Anor and Iana (both introduced in the previous story, but present enough here). Celehar as a character is pretty interesting but if you don’t know who a lot of people are in the story, then his relationships or thoughts about them may not be as nuanced.