About 8 h 15 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 17 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
About the book
Sam Vimes has promised his wife Sybil two weeks at her country estate with their young son, away from the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. When a goblin girl is murdered, he begins investigating a community whose laws scarcely recognize goblins as people and whose respectable inhabitants would prefer he stop asking questions. An inexperienced local constable and Vimes's valet help him pursue the case.
Reader notes
Country-house comedy, jokes about young Sam's fascination with poo and a police procedural run alongside an angry concern for who receives the law's protection. It's comic fantasy that takes prejudice seriously. The eighth City Watch novel can be read independently, though it returns to an established cast.
How it reads
Writing style
Conversational · Direct · Witty
Tone
Dark · Humorous · Satirical · Suspenseful
Structure
Linear
Driven by
Ideas · Mystery · Plot
Point of view
Third person, omniscient
Setting
Discworld countryside (invented world)
Reading complexity
Writing
3 / 5
Ideas
3 / 5
Structure
3 / 5
Background knowledge
2 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Writing
How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas
How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure
How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge
Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity
Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
No, the eighth City Watch novel can be read independently, though it returns to an established cast. It is also the thirty-ninth Discworld novel.
Is it more comedy or crime story?
Country-house comedy and a police procedural run together, with jokes about young Sam’s fascination with poo alongside Vimes’s murder investigation. The humor sits beside an angry concern for prejudice and who receives the law’s protection.
Is it hard to read?
Not really, the prose is conversational, direct and witty, and the investigation follows a linear structure at a brisk pace. The ideas concern justice, oppression and power.
What disturbing content should I expect?
The murder of a goblin girl is central to the investigation, alongside prejudice against a community whose laws scarcely recognize goblins as people. Violence is mild, but the treatment of injustice is serious.
How long is it?
416 pages in the Harper Paperbacks 2024 paperback edition.
Which edition is shown here?
Harper Paperbacks · 2024 · Paperback. ISBN 9780063374263.
How long does it take to read Snuff?
About 8 hours 15 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 416-page Harper Paperbacks edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett was an English fantasy novelist whose career began with The Carpet People and became centered on the long-running Discworld series. Starting with The Colour of Magic, Discworld developed from a broad parody of sword-and-sorcery conventions into a more flexible form of comic satire. Pratchett built stories around familiar fantasy machinery such as wizards, dragons, gods, and Death, then used it to examine institutions and ordinary social behavior. His method combines brisk plots, conversational wit, absurd premises, and characters whose practical weaknesses often prove more revealing than heroic competence. Guards! Guards! turns a dragon story into an inquiry into civic authority and policing, while Small Gods brings organized religion and sincere belief into conflict through a god trapped in the body of a tortoise. Mort similarly makes Death’s apprentice confront rules that appear fixed by fate. The result is fantasy distinguished by its alertness to power, faith, bureaucracy, and human folly, while remaining accessible as comedy.
