Snuff recap

Sam Vimes, Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch and reluctant Duke of Ankh, is made to take a holiday at his wife's country estate, where he finds that a copper is still a copper. The district's goblins are treated as vermin, which under local law they are, and a young goblin woman has been murdered. The local chief constable, a young man named Feeney Upshot, arrests Vimes for it; Vimes turns him into a deputy instead, and together they uncover a trade run by the county's own gentry, shipping goblins abroad as slaves and smuggling goods on the return leg, with a professional killer named Stratford enforcing it. Vimes pursues the boats downriver through a flood, is nearly killed, and brings the evidence and the survivors back. The case ends not only in arrests but in a change of the law: at a concert in Ankh-Morpork a goblin girl plays the harp for the city's rich and powerful, and goblins are recognized as people. Vimes returns to the city with his family, his holiday having gone exactly as everyone expected.

Previously, in earlier books: Sam Vimes rose from a drunken night watchman to Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, rebuilding it into a large mixed force of humans, dwarfs, trolls, werewolves, and others, and became Duke of Ankh through his marriage to the aristocratic Lady Sybil Ramkin, a title he has never enjoyed. He answers, grudgingly, to Lord Vetinari, the Patrician, who finds him useful precisely because he cannot be bought or flattered. Vimes distrusts privilege, especially his own, polices by the principle that the law applies to everybody or it is not the law, and keeps a tight hold on his own temper because he knows what is underneath it. During an earlier case an ancient dwarfish thing got into his head and has remained there since, watching, as a kind of unwelcome guardian. He and Sybil have a young son, and Vimes's fiercest personal rule is that he is home to read to the boy at six o'clock.

Vimes is manoeuvred by his wife, with Lord Vetinari's approval, into taking the first holiday of his adult life: a stay at the Ramkin family's country estate, along with Lady Sybil, six-year-old Young Sam, and Willikins. The countryside receives him as a duke, which he loathes, and he discovers immediately that he does not know how to stop being a policeman. He notices the things the locals no longer see: the careful way people talk around certain subjects, the deference that goes slightly wrong, and the goblins who live in the hills above the estate and are regarded by everybody as vermin, which under the law here is exactly what they are.

Vimes explores the village and its pub, where the landlord recognizes him faster than any country publican should. He meets the local gentry at dinner and finds them polite, incurious, and united in the view that goblins are pests to be cleared. Young Sam, meanwhile, has fallen in love with a local children's author's book about animal droppings and pursues the subject relentlessly. Vimes takes note of a young local man who talks to him about the goblins and then is not seen again, and of the fact that nobody appears to consider this worth reporting. The country grows quietly more hostile the longer he asks questions, and the smell of a crime he cannot yet name settles over the whole estate.

Vimes finds the body of a young goblin woman who has been beaten to death. Under local law this is not murder, because a goblin is not a person, and the district has no intention of treating it as one. Feeney Upshot, the young and entirely untrained chief constable, arrives and arrests Vimes for the killing; Vimes, who could have stopped him, allows it, then takes charge of both the arrest and the constable, and begins turning him into a real policeman. Back in Ankh-Morpork the Watch has picked up a goblin item as evidence, and Sergeant Colon, who has handled it, is being slowly and frighteningly taken over by whatever is bound up in it. Vimes starts building a case in a place where the local magistrates, the local money, and the local law are all on the other side.

Vimes goes up into the goblin caves and learns what the district has been careful not to know: the goblins have a religion, a language, a craft, and a rigorous moral code, and one young goblin woman, taught by the local children's author, plays the harp well enough to settle the question of what goblins are for anyone honest enough to listen. The reason for the murder becomes clear as the trade behind it surfaces: goblins have been rounded up and shipped abroad as slave labour for the tobacco plantations, with smuggled goods carried on the return trips, organized and financed by people with land, titles, and friends. Enforcing it is Stratford, a local killer who works without hesitation or feeling, and who now knows that the Duke of Ankh is asking questions.

With Feeney beside him and a goblin guide who knows every inch of the country, Vimes goes after the boats carrying the captured goblins downriver. A storm turns into a flood, and the pursuit becomes a night run down a rising river that no sane person would attempt, ending with Vimes half drowned and washed up a long way from anywhere. In the city, Wee Mad Arthur works the docks and the warehouses from angles nobody thinks to guard, following the smuggled goods back to the people paying for them, and turns up an unexpected fact about his own origins along the way. Vimes survives, catches up with the boats, and takes them, and the surviving goblins are freed and, for the first time, in the hands of somebody prepared to treat what was done to them as a crime.

The pursuit ends downriver at Quirm, where Vimes, filthy and exhausted, hands over prisoners, evidence, and a case, and is put back together by the local Watch and eventually by his wife. Stratford, however, is not among those taken, and is loose and moving. Vimes returns to the estate and then to Ankh-Morpork with everything he needs: witnesses, documents, the boats, and the survivors. Sergeant Colon is freed of what he was carrying once the goblin property is returned to the people it belongs to. Feeney, having done everything asked of him and rather more, is no longer a village constable in anything but title, and the question is no longer whether the crime can be proved but whether a court will accept that a crime against goblins is a crime at all.

The case moves to the city, where the law, not the arrests, is the real battleground: everything Vimes has depends on goblins being people, and at present they legally are not. Vetinari, who has been several steps ahead throughout, arranges the occasion for settling it, a concert at the Opera House before an audience of the city's wealthiest and most influential. Vimes prepares the evidence, Miss Beedle prepares her pupil, and the aristocratic families behind the trade prepare to brazen it out. Stratford, who has nothing left to lose, makes his own preparations, and they involve Vimes's household.

At the Opera House, Tears of the Mushroom plays the harp in front of the city's rich and powerful, and an audience raised to believe goblins were vermin listens to one make music. That, together with the case Vimes has built, is enough: the law is changed and goblins become people, with everything that follows from it. Stratford makes his last attempt, going after Vimes and his family, and is taken; the estate is set alight in the course of it. The aristocrat who financed the slaving trade is dealt with by Vetinari on terms that strip him of everything, the freed goblins are given standing and protection, Sergeant Colon recovers, and Feeney Upshot ends the affair as a genuine policeman with a career in front of him. Vimes goes home to Ankh-Morpork with his wife and son, having taken the only holiday of his life and turned it, exactly as everyone expected, into police work.

Vimes proves the case: local landowners, with money and a name behind them, have been shipping goblins abroad as slave labour for the tobacco plantations and running smuggled goods on the same boats, and a young goblin woman was murdered to keep it quiet. Stratford, the killer, makes a last attempt on Vimes and on his family, and is taken; the aristocrat who financed the trade is dealt with by Vetinari on terms that leave him with nothing. The captured goblins are freed, Sergeant Colon recovers once the goblin pot he was carrying is returned to its owners, and the young country constable Feeney Upshot finishes the case as a real policeman with a future in the Watch. The decisive stroke is not an arrest: at a concert in Ankh-Morpork's Opera House, in front of the city's wealthy and powerful, Tears of the Mushroom plays the harp, and an audience that had always been told goblins were vermin sits and listens to one make music. On the strength of that, and of the case Vimes has built, the law changes and goblins become people, with the rights that follow. Vimes goes home to the city and the job, having taken the only holiday of his life and turned it, as everyone including his wife expected, into police work.