2025 fantasy mystery, second in the series. On the border of the
Empire, a new member of the mission negotiating with a petty kingdom
has disappeared from his room and later turned up, well, some of him
has turned up, floating in the canals. But why would he even have been
a target?
Bennett is having fun with this one, starting with a classic
locked-room mystery and progressing to a mastermind evil plotter who
seems at times to spend more effort on throwing out red herrings than
on their actual nefarious objectives. Any new piece of evidence has to
be analysed both for what it reveals and for what conclusions the
villain may have wanted the investigators to draw from it.
"Nothing irks me more than a showy murderer, as if their wretched
deeds were some mystical marvel!"
In this sense it's more thriller than mystery, and a late revelation
was so heavily foreshadowed that I was a little surprised the
brilliant investigators hadn't already discussed the possibility.
(Except for Dolabra, whose style generally involves knowing far more
than everyone else but revealing only enough to be useful.)
But at the same time this is very much a book in which people talk
about a thing in one context while strongly implying that it's
relevant to another as well, and the constant subtext is that an
autocrat is simply bad for a polity even if they're trying to do the
right thing. (While he doesn't explicitly name it, I suspect from the
author's note that Bennett was as perplexed by the popularity of the
vile actions and people in A Game of Thrones as I was.)
Again not quite as clever as it thinks it is, but still jolly good.