The Mountains of Mourning

This is a novella about Miles on Barrayar after the events of A Warrior's Apprentice and while he's waiting for his first assignment (surely, ship duty :drum:). Miles gets tasked by his father to help a woman from out in the country investigate the murder of her child that nobody else will listen to.

This is not so much a mystery story so much as it is an opportunity to stick Miles in a rural area with poor Barrayarans to navigate a thorny social and political situation as Lord Miles Vorkosigan. You get to see him deal with folks outside of the military or aristocracy and show more directly some of the cultural biases going on on Barrayar. (I'm still not 100% sure how I feel about how this story treats the impoverished hill folks. Miles certainly carries less bias than the officers he brings with him, but there's still a feeling that he feels ashamed and responsible for them, even if he is more respectful than others.)

This is probably unintentional, but this story also works exceptionally well coming off of the courtroom scene at the end of the previous book, which dredges back up events from Barrayar where Aral Vorkosigan had Carl Vorhalas executed for dueling, due to a strict reading of the letter of the law. It's interesting to see Miles come up with a much neater solution to his own problem than his father did with his.

I like the foreshadowing of the opening scene of Miles yelling at his grandfather Piotr's grave, but even more it's interesting to see his compassionate revisionist view of Piotr during the mystery reveal climax. From the perspective of Cordelia, Piotr is a conservative stick in the mud who had to be barred from Miles' uterine replicator for security reasons, but Miles looks back and is able to see how much change Piotr did deal with over his lifetime (even if he couldn't cope with everything). These musings about Piotr make for great bookends to a story about dealing with cultural change.