Grimy murder mystery in gaslamp Minas Tirith
R J Barker has established a fine career writing consistently very good to excellent fantasy that is just a little bit weird. Not so much the particular frame of the New Weird(TM), more that it reads like it was shot predominantly from a Dutch angle: you’re reading what appears at first glance to be (top quality) but reasonably down the middle fantasy and then you realise everything is just a little quirky, unsettling, or both. In Mortedant’s Peril, Barker deploys that lens to great effect to not one but two of my favourite fantasy building blocks: the book is a murder mystery set in a well-drawn secondary world city.
After a brief prologue from the perspective of the murderer, the book opens with our protagonist, Irody Hasp, arriving at the scene of a death in a down-at-heel neighbourhood. Hasp is a Mortedant, a quasi-religious order which reads and passes on the last thoughts of the dead (This is one of the three great orders of the city of Elbay, the others being the magic engineers the Spurriers and the more familiarly clerical Worshipful, who revere the Howling God allegedly trapped beneath the city). Although he reads nothing unusual in the deceased’s thoughts, someone obviously thinks he might have, and shortly afterwards Hasp is caught up in a murder. In the rather brutal criminal law of the setting, absent any other evidence the last person seen with the deceased will be fingered as their murderer, and so Hasp has only a few days to find said evidence before his scheduled execution. The mystery plot which unfolds from this is well-crafted and surprising: the end result makes sense in a way that doesn't betray the reader or the setting, but neither is it quickly obvious what the details of the (in the end quite convoluted) plot surrounding the murder are.
Perhaps the obvious comparison (and, indeed, it is one of the comps the publisher user in the blurb) with “death priest secondary world city murder mystery” is Katherine Addision’s Witness for the Dead. And at one level, sure, the similarities are obvious. Both Addision’s Celehar and Barker’s Hasp are ultimately gentle men who have been ill-used by people who are not, both are death priests investigating murders. But the sensibility of Elbay is very different from that of Amalo, and Irody Hasp is a very, very different character to Celehar. Celehar is a quiet, lonely man with little understanding of his own worth & endless empathy for his clients. Hasp, meanwhile, is a quiet, lonely man (though he'd not realise the latter) who is, at the start of the novel, a prim snob with a significant collection of prejudices about pretty much anyone and anything and a perhaps inflated sense of his own worth. He has a general contempt for pretty much all other people and institutions he comes across. He finds fault with the behaviour of both people higher and lower in social status to him, is dismissive of religious belief and, when we see him encounter the Sea People – another species of sapient which exists in the setting – somewhat racist as well.
What Barker does and does well is, over time and with exposure, show us that Hasp’s bigotry is more due to ignorance than deep character law and is not particularly closely held; he slowly realises that perhaps his prejudices are not universally justified. This is achieved in large part by making Hasp do something he has not been able to do for quite some: rely on other people. The key supporting cast who achieve this are Whisper – a Sea Person mercenary forced upon him as a guard after the murder – and Mirial, the sister of the murder victim who essentially swindles Hasp into taking her on as an apprentice. These characters are well-drawn, with enough detail coming through to get a sense of personality while also making it clear that Hasp very much does not have a complete picture of his (initially unwanted) companions.
The setting itself, the city of Elbay, is a remarkably evocative thing. It resembles M John Harrison’s Viriconium superimposed on Minas Tirith with a side of Dickensian London (Given that Harrison’s city is in part a response to what he saw as the fussy nerdism of Tolkien and his successors, this is a provocative choice of setting). I do not think the Minas Tirith reference can be accidental. Like Tolkien’s city, Elbay has seven tiers, with the top being a castle within which a possibly absent ruler allegedly resides. Like Minas Tirith, Elbay was designed from the ground up to resist invasion, and with that imminent threat now centuries in the past, the city’s defensive orientation makes little sense and is in some ways a net negative to its residents, as I imagine is the case in Minas Tirith after the fall of Sauron. The Viriconium aspect comes from the gothic skewering of the more romantic side of fantasy, the grime and the steam and the old technology which the residents still use but do not wholly understand (and is no longer wholly reliable). This obviously overlaps with the Dickensian aspect of the worldbuilding, but the Dickens influence goes wider than just the cityscape. The wonderfully evocative names, the well-judged aspects of caricature in some of the characterisation, and the ongoing touch of genuinely funny humour throughout all point in that direction as well, and the labyrinthine bureaucracy and legal system are certainly reminiscent of Bleak House.
The worldbuilding is widescreen in its approach, which works for the book's pace. By this I mean it flits from set piece to set piece of the murder investigation with an impressionistic view of the city in between rather than a detailed one. Points of detail and specificity (I particularly like the communal plumbing whereby the further down the city you go the more second and third and fifth hand the water is) do contribute to the worldbuilding, but a lot is left in soft focus. This doesn't bother me, but if you're a worldbuilding nerd this may frustrate.
As with the slow evolution of Hasp’s character, this approach is reflective of the fact that is both Book One of a series and that it has its own distinct (and complete) plot and character arcs and the reader is expected to have patience with both. As noted above, aside from the prologue, the narration is in the first person and thus tightly. At one point a fair way through the novel, Mirial takes Hasp off the main streets to avoid attention. As he goes through these back alleys and byways, he sees “quiet neighbourhoods... [he] had never seen before, places where the houses rose up in great steps and grew on top of each other in teetering piles that almost met just above our heads”. Until the events of the novel, his small life – and his bigotry – have constrained his experience of his city and its people and it is the later opening up of his character which opens up some of the world as well. Hooks for the sequels and further character dives (Hasp and Whisper both have very interesting pasts which are very much not fully explored in this book) similarly remain, and we can expect further unspooling across the rest of the series. This is entirely deliberate and brilliantly done, to my reading, but I can see it irritating readers who expect things to be more clearly and fully laid out from the get-go and want an immediately likeable narrator.
Like the characters, Mortedant's Peril's thematic concerns resist simplistic analysis. In the opening chapters of the book, reading Hasp’s repeated sneers about religion, I thought I was seeing the voice of the author. And there is some of that in here, sure, fanaticism for religious or personal reasons is clearly not something the book has much time for. But the stuff at the start I nodded along with sympathetically as Hasp sneered about the Worshipful is shown later on to be just another emanation of the Little England bigotry (Little Elbay?) he'd built for himself; a wider exposure to a wider range of believers showed that view impoverished. It could be read as a condemnation of the way class and capital eat up and spit out those at the bottom of the heap (here, in the towering hill-city of Elbay, literally the bottom). And yet even that understanding is at least complicated by the raw utilitarian views of one of the supporting characters one might be tempted to class as 'good'.
Ultimately, this is a riotous, seething romp of a book with a city and a cast that are both weird and fantastical and also viscerally, plausibly human. Another very impressive series starter from an author who has an unblemished record of producing them.
--
The Math
Highlights:
- Well crafted fantasy mystery in a wonderfully realised setting
- Both demands and rewards patience from the reader
- Asshole protagonist (complimentary)
Nerd coefficient: 8/10
Reference: R. J. Barker, Mortedant's Peril [Tor, 2026].
POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social
