Saint Death's Daughter

Miscellaneous Stones, called Lanie, is the daughter of the Royal Assassin and the Chief Executioner of Liriat, born into a family of assassins and executioners. She is also a necromancer with an unusually close tie to the goddess of death, and she is allergic to violence: when she touches someone lately brushed by violence, even in thought, echo wounds open on her own body. When her parents are murdered, Lanie is left alone in Stones Manor with a mountain of family debt, a creditor named Sari Scratch at the door, and the unreliable ghost of her great grandfather as her only teacher in necromancy.

Her older sister, Amanita Muscaria Stones, known as Nita, comes home to deal with the debt, and Nita is as cheerfully murderous as Lanie is gentle. Nita takes a commission from the Blood Royal for a series of assassinations that ends in her own murder, and after a jump of seven years Lanie is left guarding Nita's daughter, Sacred Datura Stones, who wants revenge, against the sorcerer queen called the Blackbird Bride. All the while Lanie writes letters to a pen friend, the fire priest Canon Lir, and wonders whether she might be allowed some happiness of her own. The book closes with a long battle.

Cooney is a poet and a performer, and the prose is ornate, funny and dense, full of wordplay and footnotes that list the Stones family's many relatives and their many ways of dying young. That is the pleasure and the obstacle. It is a long book, the main plot takes a long time to take shape, and readers who want a quick adventure may give up. Readers who like voice above all will not. Kirkus summed it up as "Grisly, dark, lovely, funny, heartfelt." It suits readers of Terry Pratchett, Gideon the Ninth or Catherynne M. Valente.