Snuff

Snuff is the 39th novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and you've got to take your hat off to a man who responds to the impending loss of faculty to Alzheimer's by setting out to write a murder mystery. Admittedly, it's not the twistiest of mysteries, but nevertheless it's a pretty tight plot.

We're back with Sam Vimes for this one, as Ankh-Morpork's hard-bitten watchman brings big city law to the countryside in a narrative which owes a lot to In the Heat of the Night, but with the inevitable Discworld slant. It continues the process of modernisation, with factories, plantations and ox-powered paddle boats added to the already established telegraph network and movable type printing to drag Ankh-Morpork kicking and screaming out of the Century of the Fruitbat, and almost unrecognisably far from the high fantasy pastiche of The Light Fantastic.

As with many of Pratchett's more recent works (by which, I feel old to recount, I pretty much mean the last fifteen to twenty years) the humour of the novel is tied up with a darker side and an exploration of the human condition. In common with the Sam Vimes back-catalogue (post-Guards, Guards at least), this means an examination of the importance of law in separating right from wrong, and in particular the adherence to law as the last fire by which savage humanity can warm themselves and keep from falling back into the blackness. There is also a pretty solid - if not unproblematic; the story is still about the white folks - look at racism; ground that Pratchett has covered before, but rarely so bleakly, as the goblins also embody an extreme of class-based oppression.

Snuff is a solid adventure with a good conspiracy/murder mystery at its core, and a lot of thought behind it. It was also at least one soul-destroying child death short of what I had feared, so that's good.