James Nicoll Reviews

Katherine Addison’s 2025 The Orb of Cairado is a stand-alone academic mystery novella. Orb is a Chronicles of Osreth work.

For most people, the destruction of the airship Wisdom of Choharo was significant because the emperor and all but one of his heirs died with the airship. Disgraced scholar Ulcetha Zhorvena’s best friend Mara perished with the Wisdom of Choharo. For Ulcetha, what was for everyone else a national tragedy was a very personal one.

Mara’s death has consequences Ulcetha could not foresee.

Mara’s widow Sinzharo delivers a mysterious bequest to Ulcetha: an envelope containing a map of the Vershaleen Islands, torn out of a book. There is no accompanying text that might explain why Mara left the map to Ulcetha or what its significance could be.

Unwilling to let the matter drop, Ulcetha makes an educated guess that the map came from one of Mara’s own books. This line of inquiry leads Ulcetha to the source of the map, a travel guide inside of which Ulcetha finds inscribed a string of letters and numbers.

What would be to a lay person a random sequence is to Ulcetha a Library index number. Although Ulcetha’s disgrace resulted in his being barred from the Library, it’s not difficult for the scholar to break into the Library to see just what is waiting for him at that index number. He is astonished to find a hollowed-out book holding the Orish Veltavan, a priceless historical artifact, a tangle of gold wire and jewels.

The Orish Veltavan was stolen five years earlier. Blame fell on Ulcetha and while nothing could be proved—because Ulcetha was innocent—he was nevertheless stripped of his rank and ejected. Now Ulcetha has the very artifact he was accused of stealing. How to return it without making the return look like a confession?

Hoping his account of how the Orish Veltavan fell into his hands is too ludicrous to be seen as a self-serving lie, Ulcetha turns to senior academic Osmer Trenevar1. The two embark on a quest to which the Orish is the clue. In the course of which they stumble over the murdered corpse of missing academic Osmer Aidrina.

Who stole the artifact? How did airship crewman Mara know where it was? Who murdered Aidrina? And most importantly, what should Ulcetha do when he figures out the answers to those questions?

~oOo~

As you can tell from the links, this novella is from Subterranean, not tor dot com. I am a great fan of tor dot com², but they’re hardly the only novella publisher out there. If readers would just cast their nets a little wider, their efforts would be well-rewarded.

Although this is a novella, the plot is rather dense. Some authors require hundreds of pages to do what Addison accomplishes in 101 pages. Some authors should study this book intensely.

Addison rather implausibly presents academia as a hotbed of status-hungry climbers, guided by self-interest and personal animus, not cool logic and scholarly dedication. While of course this takes place in a secondary universe, surely universities in all possible forms are staffed by paragons of intellectual virtue³. I expect readers will not be able to offer even one real-world example of the shenanigans such as those presented in this short piece.

It's plain that if the world of this setting has a genre analogous to cozy mysteries, Ulcetha does not believe that their conventions apply in the real world (though he does pay attention to the adventure novels he reads, which saves him from… spoiler). We can tell this because having connected the dots, he does not then confront the killer in some isolated location, loudly announce he is going reveal all to the police but not just yet, or orchestrate a drawing room scene in a room filled with weapons. Instead, he opts for a course of action that might see justice done without giving the killer a chance to stab him⁴.

Orb was a pleasant way to spend an evening. Well, pleasant for me. Not so much for Ulcetha and definitely not for Aidrina. If you’ve a hankering for a skillfully crafted novella whose author knew exactly what she wanted to do and how to do it, consider purchasing Orb.

The Orb of Cairado is available here (Publisher), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books). I did not find Orb at Bookshop UK.

1: Osmer is a title shared by many characters. I kept reading it as a name rather than a title, which frequently confused me when I was reading. I would think that two dissimilar names both starting with Osmer were the same person. At least until I figured out that this didn’t make sense and then remembered that Osmer was a title like, um, the Honorable.

2: Dear Reactor, formerly tor dot com, please keep publishing me.

3: Dear University of Waterloo, please don’t fire me.

4: Or, as in the case of the CBS Mystery Theatre episode I recently listened to, poison the detective in mid-sentence in the drawing room scene, or in the case of a different episode, frame the investigator for the very crime he is investigating.