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bluejayreads's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
4.0
The City Watch subseries seems to have only one plot: Preventing people from doing a monarchy. Someone wants Ankh-Morpork to have a king again and start scheming to make it happen, and the Watch has to step in and stop it from happening.
In the first City Watch book, Guards! Guards!, they crowned a dragon king. In the second book, Men at Arms, there was a scheme to replace the patrician with a king (although that scheme did generally fade into the background of the book as a whole). And this one is a murder mystery and, again, another plot to crown a king.
When I first started reading the City Watch subseries, I thought Carrot was going to be the protagonist, or perhaps a deuteragonist with Commander Vimes. But Carrot really took a back seat in this one. He was there and useful, but not a major player. The characters with the most page time in this one were Vimes (expected) and Angua (less expected). Vimes was just Vimes, now with a small taste of married life, but Angua got a lot of development – not growth exactly, but learning more about her inner thoughts and what makes her tick.
She was also the driving force for a couple of the themes this book had going on. One of the bigger ones was workplace sexism, both benevolent and less so. A more minor one, and one that’s run as an undercurrent through the other City Guard books as well, is racism/prejudice against undead people. And there were some non-Angua-related themes as well. There was the question of what people really want from government, which came up a few times. And the more major theme of who gets to be a person was explored through the murder mystery, since that plot involves a lot of golems.
I’m not normally much for murder mysteries, but this one didn’t feel like a traditional murder mystery. Perhaps it’s because there’s so much else going on, perhaps it’s because it quickly ends up being more focused on finding the suspect than determining the whodunnit. But regardless, it was a solid story. The side characters were great, Ankh-Morpork is such a fun setting, and the whole book is entertaining and often funny. It’s a good story all around, and maybe my favorite City Watch book so far.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Sexism, Murder, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Body horror, Misogyny, Suicide, and Blood
Minor: Animal death, Child death, Grief, and Death of parent
Fantasy racism