Katherine Addison's THE WITNESS FOR THE DEAD is set in the same fantasy kingdom as THE GOBLIN EMPEROR, but you don't need to have read the latter. Thara Celehar is a Witness for the Dead, able to access the memory of the recently deceased to resolve disputes and solve mysteries, and he has a number of such mysteries to solve. The foremost is the murder of a singer at one of the city's opera houses, found floating in a canal. There's also an inheritance case to untangle, and a forest town has a ghoul that needs to be handled.

I enjoyed this a lot. Celehar is a likeable character, duty-bound to fulfill his role but with regrets about his past and a possible new love interest. The setting is evocatively drawn: a sprawling and mazy city with dozens of religions, a Gothic environment where maintaining cemeteries is very important because the occupants of unmaintained graves can rise as ghouls.

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