2020 fantasy novelette, prequel to the rest of the Locked Tomb series.
When a study sealed for 400 years is to be opened, the young Palamedes
Sextus and Camilla Hect are part of the investigating team. But
someone has been in there since it was sealed.
This is barely beyond short story length, and there's not much
room for subtlety of plot; while it's framed as a mystery the solution
is more a set of plausible things to happen in this necromancy-based
setting than it is deducible from the information given. Really, it's
more of a study of character, particularly of Palamedes, combined with
some effective pokes at library bureaucracy.
But it's not an ideal route into the novels: in particular without
having read Gideon the Ninth you won't have had any sort of
introduction to the setting, so most of the details will have no
framework to fit into and will become just pleasant decoration. It's
much more a way of revisiting characters one already knows about, in
an earlier stage of their lives.
At the time of writing this is still available on
tor.com.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.