He's on a mission from the gods.
Petty Pewter Gods is the eighth novel of the Garrett, P.I. series by Glen Cook. It is a Fantastic Noir series set in a High Fantasy world. Garrett is a private investigator, former Marine, and Knight in Sour Armor working to solve a variety of cases with all the witches as well as other creatures about him.
Garrett follows a beautiful redheaded woman through the market before he finds himself recruited by a bunch of Physical God 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.
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.
Can Garrett negotiate his way out of a war of the divine?
Followed by Faded Steel Heat.
Petty Pewter Gods has the following tropes:
- All for Nothing: Garrett more or less refuses to become involved in the conflict and the infighting largely resolves itself.
- Author Tract: 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.
- The Beautiful Elite: All of the female gods are incredibly beautiful and the men can be so as well if they want.
- Big Brother Instinct: 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.
- Clever Crows: 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.
- Continuity Nod: 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.
- Crisis of Faith: Dean suffers one of these when Garrett reveals to both him and a bishop that the gods are incredibly small minded sociopaths.
- Death of the Old Gods: 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.
- Did Not Think This Through: 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.
- Divine Date: Garrett makes several flirtacious advances against the Beautiful People goddesses.
- Divine Parentage: Cat, daughter of Imara. Thanks to her pantheon's Double Standard, Imara keeps Cat's existence a secret from Imar.
- Eldritch Abomination: It is implied that the gods come from a realm where these are common place and Garrett even mentions Cthulhu.
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: 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.
- Invisible to Normals: 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.
- Jerkass Gods: 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.
- Living MacGuffin: Garrett accidentally becomes one of these due to some Powers That Be meddling. They 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 work out that way.
- Powers That Be: Annoy the heck out of Garrett in Petty Pewter Gods as they want him to resolve their current issues.
- The Reveal: 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.
- The Rival: The Godoroth and Shayir are feuding over which god gets to have a temple in the Dream Quarter.
- Roof Hopping: Garrett and Cat do quite a bit of this when they're eluding the attentions of the Petty Pewter Gods.
- Shapeshifter Baggage: 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.
- Shout-Out: Garrett's pursuit by Nog the Inescapable is an homage to "Liane the Wanderer", one of the Dying Earth short stories.
- Trojan Horse: Garrett slips out of his house without being seen inside an old wine barrel.
- Unicorn: Black Mona, the Shayir hunter-goddess, rides one in Petty Pewter Gods.
- The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): No-Neck brings Garrett up to speed on how the Dream Quarter works, only to get interrogated to death for his trouble.
- World's Most Beautiful Woman: Imara being the goddess of love qualifies as this but Garrett says its hard to tell given the goddesses are all beyond lovely.
- You Are Number 6: Cat's cherub buddy is called Fourteen, because the mythos he comes from never bothered to give its cherubim individual names.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Garrett points out that he gets a strong sense that he'll receive this from the gods rather than any reward.
