Reading The Chronicles of Osreth

I'm on vacation with plenty of time to read and worked my way through Katherine Addison's Chronicles of Osreth series. I gave The Goblin Emperor a shot based on Abigail Nussbaum's re-review on Lawyers Guns Money, and loved it, so I continued on through the rest.

The Goblin Emperor

Very much up my alley, reminds me of Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief novels, like The King of Attolia. Unlike Turner's Thief novels, where the King and his motivations are described from the outside, Addison's Emperor tells us exactly what he's trying to do in the first person. Both focus on the relationships between their leader and subjects, and what it means to make just, successful decisions from such a position.

The Witness for the Dead

Witness is very different from The Goblin Emperor, though set in the same world. You can tell that Addison invented Witness's main character during The Goblin Emperor and wanted to explore his tragedy in depth. I found the focus on bureaucracy as an extension of the relationships between people to be interesting, the varied mysteries surrounding the deaths he witnesses-for engaging.

The Grief of Stones

The beginning of Grief reminded me strongly of Sherlock Holmes. I got the same impression during Witness — a Sherlock without the encyclopedic knowledge, able to connect the dots, but needing to talk to experts and ask the right questions in order to uncover the dots. The opening death reminded me of the The Red-Headed League or The Five Orange Pips.

The Tomb of Dragons

If Witness and Grief hadn't kept me engrossed in murder mystery, I probably would have been annoyed at the lack of character development for the main character, but I was, so Tomb came along to harvest the crops that Witness and Grief planted as seeds for a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.