Three Parts Dead is set in a world where gods exist, and where the power of a god can power a city. That’s literal in the case of Alt Coulumb, where the power of the fire-god Kos fuels the steam furnaces that heat the city and make its trains run. In this world, gods gain power by making contracts: they get power from worship, and lend that power to others with the proviso that it will be repaid, with interest. But gods aren’t immortal: if they make contracts they can’t support, their power can be sapped, and they can die. Which seems, at the start of the book, to be what has happened to Kos, whose Everburning flame has disappeared from his altar during the watch of a young monk named Abelard.
When a god dies, in this world, things don’t just stop running all at once. Contracts come due at the new moon, but Kos’s church has until then to try to sort things out. Which they do by calling in Elayne Kevarian, a partner at a renowned Craft firm, which is like contract law + magic. Elayne arrives in Alt Coulumb with her new associate, Tara Abernathy, a recent graduate who was literally thrown out of school, but who impressed Kevarian with her nerve first.
So: Elayne and Tara have to figure out why Kos died—whether it was from negligence on his part/the part of his church, or whether it was something else. Meanwhile, a judge is murdered, and a gargoyle is the prime suspect: the gargoyles were guardians of the dead goddess Seril, former lover of Kos, and were banished from the city after her death: is the judge’s death related to the god’s death, and, if so, how?
There’s a whole lot going on in this book: I’ve failed to mention Abelard’s friend Cat, who’s a junkie for getting her blood sucked by vampires. And I’ve failed to mention Justice, the successor to the dead goddess Seril, or her police force, the Blacksuits, of whom Cat is one. I’ve failed to mention Tara and Elayne’s antagonist, the counsel for Kos’s creditors, who’s also a professor and the reason Tara was thrown out of school. But somehow it’s not too much: the plot and the world-building of this book were really satisfying, as were the characters: I like Tara and her intelligence and determination, and Abelard and his crisis of faith.
The writing was mostly serviceable, with bits I found overwritten or awkward and bits I found totally great. I could have done without bits like this:
It was too nice a morning for Al Cabot to die. The storm had passed in the night, leaving shredded clouds to catch red fire as the sun swelled on the horizon. (21)
or this:
Elayne Kevarian meditated on the rooftop of the Sanctum of Kos as the sun declined behind its mask of thick clouds. Before her and beneath her, Alt Coulumb hungered for the coming night. (87)
but I’m all over this:
Dancers in second-story windows shook their hips in time with music barely audible above the crowd’s din. An ermine-robed man vomited in a gutter while his friends laughed; a candy seller blew tiny elegant animals out of molten sugar and breathed a touch of Craft into them so they glowed from inside out. (117)
It’s been a week since I finished this book, and it was a vacation read for me—I started it at home in New York, continued it in New Orleans, and finished it on Grand Cayman, on a balcony with a view of the beach and the waves of the Caribbean, so I’m probably not doing it justice. Ah well: I liked it enough that I’m planning on reading the next book in the series, even though it apparently doesn’t center on Tara (which is too bad, ’cause I liked her lots).
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