Line #39 Literature/PettyPewterGods


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2	[[caption-width-right:277:He's on a mission from the gods.]]
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4	''Petty Pewter Gods'' is the eighth novel of the Literature/GarrettPI series by Creator/GlenCook. It is a FantasticNoir series set in a HighFantasy world. Garrett is a private investigator, former Marine, and KnightInSourArmor working to solve a variety of cases with all the witches as well as other creatures about him.
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6	Garrett follows a beautiful redheaded woman through the market before he finds himself recruited by a bunch of PhysicalGod deities that recruit him to find the key to a temple in the Dream Quarter. Garrett doesn't believe in gods but these individuals make a very compelling case for their existence. Unfortunately, they're rivals with an equally potent group of gods that don't want Garrett to do their enemies any favors.
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8	While some of the gods are willing to make him offers of gold, wealth, and women, others are more determined to intimidate him out of his assistance. The Dead Man is fascinated by this conflict and many new revelations occur about how the setting works as well as the nature of the divine. Too bad Garrett couldn't care less about any of it.
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10	Can Garrett negotiate his way out of a war of the divine?
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12	Followed by ''Literature/FadedSteelHeat.''
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15	!! ''Petty Pewter Gods'' has the following tropes:
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17	* AllForNothing: Garrett more or less refuses to become involved in the conflict and the infighting largely resolves itself.
18	* AuthorTract: Cook's anvil against religion comes out a bit. Garrett's ''real'' problem with religion is that all to often the people at the top are using it solely to exploit the people at the bottom. The exact same problem he has with the royalty and the Sorcerers on The Hill.
19	* TheBeautifulElite: All of the female gods are incredibly beautiful and the men can be so as well if they want.
20	* BigBrotherInstinct: Despite being interested in almost everything female on the planet, Garrett gets strong kid sister vibes from Cat and refuses to look at her romantically.
21	* CleverCrows: Unlike most mortal creatures, crows can see the Shayir owl girls in ''Petty Pewter Gods''. Garrett speculates that this has to do with how ravens and crows are often associated with the gods in plenty of older religions.
22	* ContinuityNod: Garrett finds a man murdered with a kef sidhe strangling cord in ''Old Tin Sorrows'', and Morley tells him something about this exotic weapon. Four books later, in ''Petty Pewter Gods'', Garrett compares Magodor's magical rope to a kef sidhe strangling cord.
23	* CrisisOfFaith: Dean suffers one of these when Garrett reveals to both him and a bishop that the gods are incredibly small minded sociopaths.
24	* DeathOfTheOldGods: The Godoroth and Shayir are the oldest human pantheons in the region, and must compete for the right not to be evicted from the Dream Quarter.
25	* DidNotThinkThisThrough: The other gods of the Dream Quarter set up Garrett as the key because they believed he would be an objective judge of character regarding the two feuding pantheons, being a man who had no particular prejudices regarding the divine. They also believed he would be showed with bribes and fine with the contest. Instead, both pantheons try to intimidate or threaten him with plans of killing him if he doesn't obey.
26	* DivineDate: Garrett makes several flirtacious advances against the BeautifulPeople goddesses.
27	* DivineParentage: Cat, daughter of Imara. Thanks to her pantheon's DoubleStandard, Imara keeps Cat's existence a secret from Imar.
28	* EldritchAbomination: It is implied that the gods come from a realm where these are common place and Garrett even mentions Cthulhu.
29	* GodsNeedPrayerBadly: The squabble between two minor pantheons struggling to keep a vacant temple in the local religious section of town. Whoever gets kicked off the block will most likely fade away into nonexistence from lack of belief.
30	* InvisibleToNormals: The various feuding Godoroth and Shayir can't be perceived by mortals other than Garrett, for whom they're making an effort, and a few people like No-Neck who can vaguely sense there's ''something'' there.
31	* JerkassGods: The Godoroth and Shayir are considered this even among deities and are all small-minded nasty sorts that try to bully Garrett into doing their bidding.
32	* LivingMacGuffin: Garrett accidentally ''becomes'' one of these due to some PowersThatBe meddling. They [[spoiler: Intended for him to pick which of the warring pantheons should continue to exist, possibly gathering a large amount of money by the way of bribes along the way]]. It didn't [[EldritchAbomination work out that way]].
33	* PowersThatBe: Annoy the heck out of Garrett in ''Petty Pewter Gods'' as they want him to resolve their current issues.
34	* TheReveal: While Garrett is happy to believe the gods are real, he discovers they're really just divine refugees from another dimension that feed on worship in order to avoid being drawn back.
35	* TheRival: The Godoroth and Shayir are feuding over which god gets to have a temple in the Dream Quarter.
36	* RoofHopping: Garrett and Cat do quite a bit of this when they're eluding the attentions of the ''Petty Pewter Gods''.
37	* ShapeshifterBaggage: The deities can change size without difficulty, but the flying horses' torsos narrow drastically when their wings emerge, implying these animals retain the same mass with or without wings.
38	* ShoutOut: Garrett's pursuit by Nog the Inescapable is an homage to "Liane the Wanderer", one of the ''Literature/DyingEarth'' short stories.
39	* TrojanHorse: Garrett slips out of his house without being seen inside an old wine barrel.
40	* {{Unicorn}}: Black Mona, the Shayir hunter-goddess, rides one in ''Petty Pewter Gods''.
41	* TheWorldsExpertOnGettingKilled: No-Neck brings Garrett up to speed on how the Dream Quarter works, only to get interrogated to death for his trouble.
42	* WorldsMostBeautifulWoman: Imara being the goddess of love qualifies as this but Garrett says its hard to tell given the goddesses are all beyond lovely.
43	* YouAreNumberSix: Cat's cherub buddy is called Fourteen, because the mythos he comes from never bothered to give its cherubim individual names.
44	* YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness: Garrett points out that he gets a strong sense that he'll receive this from the gods rather than any reward.
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Context Literature / PettyPewterGods