★★★★☆ The Grief of Stones, by Katherine Addison
Such a pleasure to spend more time with Celehar
The Grief of Stones
Katherine Addison
Such a pleasure to spend more time with Celehar
Katherine Addison‘s beautifully named novel The Grief of Stones is the second in her Cemeteries of Amalo series. Celehar is a witness for the dead. This means two things. The first, and to my mind, the smallest, is that he has a supernatural ability to communicate with a corpse, and to ask it questions about such things as how it died, whether it left a will, etc. The second is that it is his official responsibility to represent the dead. If petitioned by, for instance, a relative, he can investigate the death. This makes him, effectively, the closest thing the city of Amalo has to a homicide detective. (So, yeah, these are detective novels, although they could hardly feel less like that genre.) In the first novel, The Witness for the Dead, he was the entire homicide division of Amalo. In this novel he gets a partner, Tomasaran, a young widow who also has the ability to talk to the dead, and who is sent to Celehar for training. So we get a little buddy-cop energy!
As a detective novel, this one is pretty good. The investigation leads Celehar and Tomasaran into an intricate web of crime, and Celehar “into the shattering depths of the loss he fears the most,” as the publisher’s blurb puts it. [spoiler1]
The real attraction of the Cemeteries of Amalo series, though, is that Celehar is genuinely a good guy. He’s a good investigator -- clever at finding and following leads. But more than that, he really cares about other people, more than about himself. I think Celehar genuinely loves everyone. It is simultaneously true that he dislikes some people, holds some in contempt, and has enemies and sometimes gets into fights and arguments. He sometimes finds himself compelled in the name of justice to advocate for their punishment or even death. Yet I always feel that Celehar would, given the choice, do what he thought would be best for the other person, no matter who that is.
Only one Cemeteries of Amalo books remains to me. (Although I note that book 3, The Tomb of Dragons, was only published this year, so perhaps there are more to come!) Soon I will have learned everything about Celehar that I ever will learn, and he will no longer be a part of my life. It’s a sad thought.
In the course of banishing a terrible monster he loses his ability to hear the dead.