Series: Shadow of the Leviathan

A++ #BookReview: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
A++ #BookReview: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson BennettA Drop of Corruption (Shadow of the Leviathan, #2) by Robert Jackson Bennett
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy mystery, urban fantasy
Series: Shadow of the Leviathan #2
Pages: 465
Published by Del Rey on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The brilliant detective Ana Dolabra may have finally met her match in the gripping sequel to The Tainted Cup—from the bestselling author of The Founders Trilogy.
In the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire’s reach, an impossible crime has occurred. A Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—abducted from his quarters while the door and windows remained locked from the inside, in a building whose entrances and exits are all under constant guard.
To solve the case, the Empire calls on its most brilliant and mercurial investigator, the great Ana Dolabra. At her side, as always, is her bemused assistant Dinios Kol.
Before long, Ana’s discovered that they’re not investigating a disappearance, but a murder—and that the killing was just the first chess move by an adversary who seems to be able to pass through warded doors like a ghost, and who can predict every one of Ana’s moves as though they can see the future.
Worse still, the killer seems to be targeting the high-security compound known as the Shroud. Here, the Empire's greatest minds dissect fallen Titans to harness the volatile magic found in their blood. Should it fall, the destruction would be terrible indeed—and the Empire itself will grind to a halt, robbed of the magic that allows its wheels of power to turn.
Din has seen Ana solve impossible cases before. But this time, with the stakes higher than ever and Ana seemingly a step behind their adversary at every turn, he fears that his superior has finally met an enemy she can’t defeat.

My Review:

There is something rotten in the state of the Empire. There are PLENTY of somethings ROTTING in the state of Yarrowdale, some naturally so, some deliberately so, some neglectfully so and some, even, all of the above. It’s a matter of which is which, which is what has brought Ana and Kol from their previous assignment to this rotting backwater on the edge of the Empire.

In a situation where the words “rotting”, “backwater” and “edge” should all be taken as many ways as possible – which is just the sort of situation that Ana Dolabra revels in solving.

Din’s first case assisting the eccentric genius (The Tainted Cup) began with the gorge-revolting sight of entirely too much corpse, as the victim had died as the result of a tree taking root in his stomach and growing downwards to root in the floor of the room in which he died even as the tree grew upward to entwine its branches with the ceiling.

This second case opens with much too little corpse, as all that officials have in the remote. soonish to be (negotiations are ongoing) imperial province of Yarrowdale of their latest assigned case are the right hand, left shoulder, and partial ribcage of the murder victim. The head comes later.

The carnivorous turtles that were clearly intended to handle corpse disposal must not have been quite hungry enough to get the job done before chance threw the remaining bits up and into the path of Imperial Iudex Commander Ana Dolabra and her assistant Dinios Kol.

It’s all part of just the delightful kind of clever, confounding, murderous puzzle that Ana Dolabra literally seems to live for, as it begins with a diabolical bit of a locked room mystery that sends out roots and tendrils until it blossoms into a vast, far-reaching conspiracy that threatens to topple the Empire.

Only for the entire, province-spanning construct to collapse of its own weight into the person of one small man who has lost sight of his purpose – as well as his mind – in a web of greed of his own manufacture, leaving Ana Dolabra bemoaning the banality of his crime even while she brings down its perpetrator and saves the empire yet again.

As she was made to do.

Escape Rating A++: For this enthralled but still somewhat emotionally exhausted reader, A Drop of Corruption – at nearly 500 pages (I think that estimate is LOW) – represents a lost weekend. I dove into the story late on Saturday and didn’t emerge until Sunday evening, still mired in a book hangover that seems as if it will require every bit as much time to recover from as one of the psychotropic drug binges that aid Ana in her deliberations.

I picked up the first book in this series, The Tainted Cup, because I couldn’t resist the premise. It’s billed as a take-off, or perhaps homage would be a better word, to Holmes and Watson. But it’s set in an epic fantasy world – for epic in multiple senses of the word. I haven’t seen this combination done at all, let alone as well as it is here, since the late Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy series a VERY long time ago.

There has been a recent run on science fiction mysteries, including an SF Holmes and Watson-esq duo in Claire O’Dell’s A Study in Honor, but fantasy mystery, not so much. (The exact opposite is happening in regards to fantasy, SF and romance, as fantasy romance is hugely on the uptick, but science fiction romance is ticking along at the same rate it has always been – meaning some and some really good but not a lot.)

What makes Ana and Kol’s investigations so fascinating – and so much weird fun to watch – are the way that the series combines their very peculiar characters – and Ana in particular is quite peculiar in multiple ways – the way their strengths and weakness shore each other up in a relationship that is clearly NEVER heading towards the romantic, AND the way they stand on the shoulders of Holmes and Watson without ever being slavishly devoted to the portrayal yet STILL managing to sharply delineate the outlines we know, love and expect.

At the same time, those character outlines are firmly set in a fantasy world that is wild and weird and strange in ways that are completely unexpected while still sitting in a frame that practically defines current epic fantasy.

There’s no epic battle between good and evil here. There’s just the evil that men, and women, and other creatures, do. Those evils are committed in a corrupt empire that is rotting from within and without – and those evils are battled by people, like Ana and Din, who are doing their damndest to stem the tide and make sure the Empire remains a place worth fighting for – in their own way.

Layered on top of all that is that there is no wand-waving magic. But there are magical potions, and concoctions, and decoctions, and grafts, and pills in a vast pharmacopeia that literally boggles the mind. It certainly boggles Ana’s mind whenever she’s in need of inspiration, stimulation, or simply something to stave off ennui.

That pharmacopeia serves as both the foundation of the empire and most likely the source of its eventual destruction. That drop of corruption in the title, is everywhere and in everything and is what makes this world go ‘round even as it brings it ever closer to the edge of annihilation. As it very nearly does in this entry in the series.

A series which I dearly hope is not even close to done yet. Because damn but the whole thing is mesmerizing and fascinating and more than reminiscent of a fever dream created by Holmes’ own 7 percent solution – if not something a bit stronger. And I’m absolutely riveted by every single part of it.

(Book three is listed in Goodreads but with no title and no date. Still, that gives me hope!)

So come for the mystery, because it is compelling from the moment its tiny locked room is opened, all the way through its mind-blowing vastness and right into its surprisingly small conclusion even as its consequences spill out to bankrupt a province and change the course of an empire. Stay to watch that drop of corruption cause gigantic ripples in the course of a vast empire. Then wait and hope with me for more in this compelling series.

A+ #BookReview: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson BennettThe Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1) by Robert Jackson Bennett
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy mystery, urban fantasy
Series: Shadow of the Leviathan #1
Pages: 432
Published by Del Rey on February 6, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In Daretana’s most opulent mansion, a high Imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree spontaneously erupted from his body. Even in this canton at the borders of the Empire, where contagions abound and the blood of the Leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death at once terrifying and impossible.
Called in to investigate this mystery is Ana Dolabra, an investigator whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities.
At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol. Din is an engraver, magically altered to possess a perfect memory. His job is to observe and report, and act as his superior’s eyes and ears--quite literally, in this case, as among Ana’s quirks are her insistence on wearing a blindfold at all times, and her refusal to step outside the walls of her home.
Din is most perplexed by Ana’s ravenous appetite for information and her mind’s frenzied leaps—not to mention her cheerful disregard for propriety and the apparent joy she takes in scandalizing her young counterpart. Yet as the case unfolds and Ana makes one startling deduction after the next, he finds it hard to deny that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.
As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the safety of the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.
Featuring an unforgettable Holmes-and-Watson style pairing, a gloriously labyrinthine plot, and a haunting and wholly original fantasy world, The Tainted Cup brilliantly reinvents the classic mystery tale.

My Review:

Just like winter in Westeros, the wet season is coming to the Empire of Khanum. There are monsters massing outside the fortifications that guard the border, and there are humans behaving monstrously within the walls, jockeying for political advantage without a care in the world for the amount of collateral damage they might cause in their quest for power.

Young, newly fledged, still probationary, assistant investigator Dinios Kol has been tasked with visiting his very first death scene on behalf of senior investigator Ana Dolabra. Din has been genetically engineered to remember everything, whether at a crime scene or not, and it’s his literal job to serve as Ana’s eyes and ears.

It’s her preference to never leave her house. If Din’s observations lead her to desiring an interview with a witness or a suspect, she’ll subpoena them to come to her. She has that right and that privilege.

Which doesn’t stop the privileged servants who maintain this particular murder scene for their highly ranked gentry masters from treating Din like dirt when he shows up at their door. In spite of pretty much everyone’s strong desire to get the corpse out of the house as soon as the evidence has been collected and the scene is released.

Even if they will need to cut the dead man out of both the floor and the ceiling of the room his body is occupying. It’s not every day that someone dies because a tree took root in their lungs and rapidly grew through their body to implant its roots in the room’s floor and interweave its branches in the ceiling.

As sensational as the murder appears on the surface (or rather, all the surfaces in the room), it’s only the beginning of the story, the case, and Din’s career as an investigator. Because the plot is thicker than Din imagines, the world is much darker and dirtier than his limited experience has led him to believe – and his mentor, the eccentric and seemingly disgraced Ana Dolabra, is considerably more than she appears.

The vast intellectual light that Dolabra is hiding in Din’s tiny, backwater village is enough to burn out a whole lot of the rot. It’s up to Din to learn enough on the job to keep himself from being caught in the flames.

Escape Rating A+: There’s been a rise in science fiction mysteries in the last couple of years, with books like Mur Lafferty’s Station Eternity, Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man, and Eddie Robson’s Drunk On All Your Strange New Words leading the way. There’s also been a resurgence of urban fantasy, a genre which was always the bastard child of the paranormal (with or without romance) and mystery (If you’re interested, take a look at T.L. Huchu’s Edinburgh Nights (starting with The Library of the Dead) and James J. Butcher’s Unorthodox Chronicles that begin with Dead Man’s Hand). But there’s never been a LOT of purely fantasy mystery – at least not since Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy, which was also, come to think of it, every bit as much of a play on Sherlock Holmes as The Tainted Cup turned out to be.

The Tainted Cup, however, is very much an epic fantasy world, but a story whose plot is wrapped around the conventions of a mystery – albeit a mystery that is not in the least cozy. The only way you’d get something cozy out of this one would be if you chopped up the tree that grew through the first body and used it to build a cozy – if somewhat gruesome – fire.

The pairing of Ana Dolabra with Dinios Kol owes a lot to Holmes and Watson – but it will also remind readers of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin – or possibly their more recent reincarnations as Pentecost and Parker in Stephen Spotswood’s series that begins with Fortune Favors the Dead. Din is young, naive and untried pretty much all the way around. He’s a small town boy who is about to be thrust into a wider and more dangerous world than he ever imagined. The Tainted Cup is just the beginning of his coming-of-age story, making him considerably more like Goodwin and Parker than Watson, although Goodwin and Parker were both more worldly wise than Din at the beginnings of their respective stories.

Dolabra, on the other hand, is very much Holmesian in her eccentricities, her extreme intolerance for boredom and consequent bad behavior in regards to alleviating it, but above all in her sheer genius for resolving the mysteries put before her. On all the other hands, her unwillingness to leave her residence to seek out the clues for herself is all Wolfe and to a limited extent, Pentecost.

But the setting of The Tainted Cup, and the epically FUBAR political situation therein, is very much fantasy of both the grimdark and steampunk varieties. The world, with its mixture of science and magic and scientifically based magic is similar to the setting of L.E. Modesitt’s Grand Illusion series that kicks off with Isolate. Din shows promise of becoming Steffan Dekkard someday, but he absolutely is not there yet. Part of the fascination of The Tainted Cup is watching Din grow into his job – especially the gray areas within it – without betraying his core principles.

It’s the story of Din learning how to bend without breaking OR breaking the truly important rules. Especially when presented with incontrovertible evidence that entirely too many people already have.

That all being said, the way that this fantasy empire works – and doesn’t – especially the alchemy of corruption and power that holds the empire back and pushes the story forward, brought both Age of Ash and In the Shadow of Lightning to my mind and might to yours as well. (A hint that if you liked either of those or The Grand Illusion you might like this as well.)

I’m writing a LOT about this book and what it reminds me of because I really, really loved it and hope others do as well, leading to what may seem like an epic number of readalikes because I’m hoping to drag people in by hook or by crook.

So, The Tainted Cup reads like a murder mystery, because it absolutely is. The story progresses because Din, sometimes at Dolabra’s request but sometimes on his own, unravels the puzzle of whodunnit, how it was done and most importantly why it was done in bits and pieces, one clue and one pull of the thread at a time.

But, while Din is pulling those threads, the tapestry of this crime and the tapestry of the empire are getting bigger and broader all around him, while at the same time fraying at the edges. Din can’t see the whole picture – he doesn’t know enough to see the whole picture. And neither do we.

Watching him work his way through lets us see the vast scope of everything, both the crime he’s uncovered and the empire that’s falling apart around it, and makes for a compelling page-turner of a story.

A story that is clearly not done when the reader turns the last page. Not that this particular case isn’t solved – because it is and satisfactorily at that – but because this case is just the tip of a very dirty iceberg.

There are at least two more books planned for the Shadow of the Leviathan series. Which is a terrific thing because Din’s journey is far from complete and the depths of this empire have not yet been plumbed – and they surely need plumbing. Surely we’ll find out whether Dolabra and Din are up for THAT dirty job in those books yet to come.