Saint Death's Daughter

Miscellaneous Stones, known as Lanie, comes from a family that has served the queens of Liriat for centuries as assassins and executioners, and she is a disaster to them, because she was born with a violence allergy so severe that a paper cut in the next room can put her in bed for a week. What she does have is a gift for necromancy of the highest order, inherited from an ancestor whose grimoire she is not yet strong enough to read properly. When her parents are killed, Lanie is left with a ruined house, her formidable and homicidal elder sister Amanita, a newborn niece, and the accumulated debt of generations, which the family's creditor intends to collect. Her solution involves a bound skeleton, a god of death who takes an interest, and a great deal of improvisation. Cooney writes in a voice of enormous exuberance, dense with invented idiom, footnotes and wordplay, and she is entirely serious underneath it about grief, about what a child owes a family that never wanted her, and about the difference between killing people and loving the dead. It is a long book that moves like a much shorter one.