Reading: Widow's Welcome
Feb. 9th, 2020 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartWidow's Welcome by D.K. Fields (in reality a partnership of two novelists, David Towsey and Katherine Stansfield) is a fantasy police procedural with really interesting worldbuilding. It's set in the city of Fenest, a grubby, seedy metropolis which is the hub of a Union comprising six very different realms whose share of power in the ruling assembly is determined by the quality of the stories they tell to the electorate every five years. Detective Cora Gorderheim is hard-bitten and cynical and not one to get involved in politics, but when a man's body is found in an alley with its mouth sewn shut just before the start of the latest election, politics seems determined to get her involved, as her quest to find the killer also raises broader questions about the state of the Union and Cora's own past.
I found the start of the novel very slow, and there seemed to be rather a lot of reiteration of the basic facts of the case. Then, about a third of the way through, it suddenly takes off with the first election story (included in full, a novella-length story inside the novel) and from that point on I really enjoyed it. This novel includes two of the six election stories; when the second finished with only about 10% of the book to go I was a little worried that it was going to turn out to be the first part of the kind of trilogy which is a single novel divided into three, but in fact this one wraps up the murder mystery while still leaving the wider questions open for the sequel (which is out in August, and which I've preordered).
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC of this book for review.
I found the start of the novel very slow, and there seemed to be rather a lot of reiteration of the basic facts of the case. Then, about a third of the way through, it suddenly takes off with the first election story (included in full, a novella-length story inside the novel) and from that point on I really enjoyed it. This novel includes two of the six election stories; when the second finished with only about 10% of the book to go I was a little worried that it was going to turn out to be the first part of the kind of trilogy which is a single novel divided into three, but in fact this one wraps up the murder mystery while still leaving the wider questions open for the sequel (which is out in August, and which I've preordered).
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC of this book for review.
