In a world beset by leviathans, investigative assistant Dinios Kol is far too occupied with his boss’s eccentricities and solving their next case. Magically altered to remember everything he sees, Din has been called to assist Ana Dolabra, an accomplished detective, who with his assistance can solve a case without ever having to visit the scene of the crime. Now a case arrives unlike anything they’ve ever dealt with before, and Din is thrust into the forefront of a murder with deadly ramifications. On the estate of a well-regarded family, an imperial officer has been found dead in his bedroom with a tree sprouting out of his body. Improbable, yet Din is tasked with discovering just how this murder was brought about. When several others turn up dead in the exact same way, Din and Ana must contend with the fact that this crime has roots far deeper than they initially expected – into the beating heart of the empire.
An unthinkable murder looms large in an empire beset by leviathans, strange contagions, and corruption blooming at its heart. In his new series, Robert Jackson Bennett takes all his wit and talent for crafting ingenious fantasy worlds and imbues them into a new fantasy setting with an eccentric detective and her disaster bisexual assistant solving an impossible crime. The Tainted Cup found me on a late-night train back from Philly last month and was the reason I was awake well into the wee hours of the night. Looking back at its transition from start to finish and the technical parts it’s no wonder why this held all my attention and has won the title of one of my top books of this year.
Undeniably humorous and brilliant in its craft, The Tainted Cup is a bold new murder mystery that reinvigorates the classic investigative pairing with a plot almost serpentine in the way that it twists and turns back upon itself in an act of reinvention. There were many times that I thought I understood the general playing field, but Bennett reassembles it endlessly, making for quite an entertaining reading journey. It’s not just the act of layering in elements to execute the overall mystery, but subverting it entirely to simultaneously construct and deconstruct the situation at hand. Characters Din and Ana are amusing individuals through which we are introduced to this new world and trust to uncover all that is hidden. Ana is persnickety and armed with a keen intelligence, whereas Din is just straight-laced and in desperate need of a break (but will he ever get one). While Bennett introduces an incredible duo, he also establishes a world teetering on the edge of destruction from outside and from within – one that I could not help but fall in love with. The descriptions of a city forever waiting for an attack from the leviathans felt both forlorn and striking, further shaped by the inner workings of the empire exposed with each passing page. Ana Dolobra really gets all the points for her silly little tricks and iconic monologue towards the end. It was very much giving Benoit Blanc, but fantasy. This was all around a hilarious and highly entertaining first book in a series. Robert Jackson Bennett has constructed a stellar fantasy world alongside an inventive magic system and I am curious to see where The Shadow of the Leviathan goes next. This is an unpredicable, but nevertheless brilliant mystery equipped with a duo to rival Watson and Holmes. The kind of story to settle in and take root in the most unexpected places.
Thank you to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing this review copy.
Trigger warnings: body horror, blood, murder, violence
Literaryrobin 