de Bodard, Aliette -- Servant of the Underworld

Aztec fantasy procedural: imagine Detective Inspector Chen as an Aztec priest. Acatl is the high priest of Mictlan, god and/or land of the dead. This is a back-corner-office-in-the-basement position, as far as the Empire is concerned, but he still gets called in to crime scenes. One turns political. The world nearly ends. (But then, when is the world not nearly ending, in that viewpoint?)

Good stuff, as long as you are okay with buckets of spilled blood. Magic costs blood, which leads to a lot of nicked fingers and earlobes, but also several scenes where Acatl roots through the temple livestock reserves for cute-and-fluffy mana supplies. (Routine human sacrifice, as in the let's-keep-the-sun-rising trope, is not erased from the setting, but it's way in the background. Not sure how I feel about that.) I have some problems with the pacing, but they're minor.

(Also, between this and the werewolf book, I am completely full up on books full of foreign names that I can neither pronounce nor remember.)


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