Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
book, review, discworld
This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later with next to no spell/grammar checking.
5/5 stars
Feet of Clay is one of my favourite books of all time.
It is the third novel in the City Watch series. There are two murders to solve and the Patrician has inexplicably fallen ill. And it all seems to be related to golems, somehow.
First and foremost, it is a bloody good mystery. It would be easy to write Discworld off as just humorous fantasy books (and it is true for some of them), but Feet of Clay is so much more. Yes, it is hilarious, but it’s also smart and deep and really good in its story telling. Terry Pratchett could have easilly become a writer of detective fiction. Easily.
The characters are amazing as always — Detritus in particular grew into something wonderful.
The golems in the book have strong ties to the Golem of Prague stories which I grew up with as a kid. In Feet of Clay, they provide an ample ground to examine religion, philosophy of life, machines and workers as well as artificial intelligence.
All that in climate of (actual) racial tensions attempts at diversifying the Ankh-Morpork police force.
