An elderly priest and an old dwarf bread museum curator are found beaten to death, and Lord Vetinari is quietly dying of a poison nobody in the Watch can find or name. Commander Sam Vimes has a murder inquiry, a poisoning he cannot explain, and a conspiracy of guild heads and heralds who would like Ankh-Morpork to have a king again — preferably a biddable one.
The evidence points at the city's golems: tireless clay workers who never sleep, never complain, and legally own nothing, not even themselves. Driven to despair, they have secretly made a golem of their own and filled its head with every hope they were never allowed to have. Meanwhile Captain Carrot works the case with Angua, and a new dwarf recruit named Cheery Littlebottom joins the Watch as its first forensic alchemist — and begins, cautiously, to admit to being a woman.
The nineteenth Discworld novel and the third City Watch book, published in 1996. A murder mystery wrapped around the question of what makes someone a person rather than a possession, and Vimes's flat refusal to accept that a city needs a king.