Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

With the risk of sounding like a commercial, I'll have to say that with this one He's Done It Again. Once again, Pratchett has shown himself to be a master of the junxaposed genres, writing what at first sight seems to be a mixture of a not so straight fantasy novel, and a parody of the standard police procedural, but which on further reading reveals itself to actually be an excellent example of the police procedural / who dunnit detective story, beside being a book about the meaning of freedom and free will, and great fun besides.
Readers who enjoy the detective stories, will be delighted with the way Pratchett appears to include every way of getting arsenic into a person that has ever been seen in books, on the screen and in history.
It is also a Discworld novel, which as has been shown before means it's a mirror of our world, with all the imperfections of the human condition shown in a revealing but always compassionate light.

Cliché mode on

Once again we follow our heroes Watch Commander Sir Samuel Vimes¹, Captain Carrot², Sergeants Colon³ and Detritus⁴, Constable Angua⁵ and Corporals Nobbs⁶ and Littlebottom⁷ as they try to find the murderer(s) of two harmless old men and the would-be poisoner of Lord Vetinari⁸.

[1]the knight
[2]the potential king
[3]the potential farmer
[4]the troll
[5]the werewolf
[6]approximately human
[7]the dwarf
[8]the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork
Other pages about Terry Pratchett