The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (Ana and Din Mysteries, #1) * * * * *
The easiest way to describe The Tainted Cup is Sherlock Holmes in a fantasy world built around biological engineering. The story takes place in the Empire of Khanum, which is protected from the sea by enormous walls. Every wet season, gigantic creatures called leviathans emerge from the ocean and approach these walls, and the Empire has built much of its infrastructure and military system around surviving them. A leviathan is not just a large animal. These creatures are so enormous that a breach can devastate entire regions.
There is something about the leviathans, however, that I immediately became suspicious about. Everyone talks about them as though they are attacking the Empire, but are they actually attacking? I kept wondering whether they might simply be migrating, following some instinctive route, or doing something else entirely that humans have interpreted as aggression because humans built a wall in their path. Toward the end of the book, Din even has a brief thought that one of the leviathans seemed as though it was trying to communicate. It is such a small moment that you could almost miss it, but it immediately made me wonder what we are eventually going to discover about these creatures. I have a feeling there is much more going on with them than the people of Khanum understand.
Our Watson in this particular Holmes and Watson pairing is Dinios Kol, usually called Din. He has just become the assistant to the brilliant and extremely eccentric investigator Anagosa Dolabra, or Ana. Din goes out into the world, examines crime scenes, interviews people, collects evidence, and then returns to Ana and reports everything he has seen and heard. Ana can then take all of those pieces and make the enormous deductive leaps that nobody else can. The dynamic is immediately recognisable if you know Sherlock Holmes, but Bennett has built enough around it that it never feels like he simply picked Holmes and Watson up and dropped them into a fantasy novel.
Din is particularly suited to his job because he is an engraver. In this world, humans can be biologically altered to enhance particular abilities, and engravers are modified to have extraordinarily powerful memories. Din can essentially record what he experiences and recall it later in incredible detail. This makes him the perfect pair of eyes and ears for an investigator who would rather remain at home and let someone else do the running around.
But Din also has severe dyslexia, and this was one of my favourite aspects of his character. His dyslexia is not something that appears once when the plot needs it and then conveniently disappears. It affects his everyday life. He has developed methods of coping with it, partly through his abilities as an engraver, but it remains something he constantly has to navigate and something he is deeply anxious about other people discovering. It also fits interestingly with his engraver abilities. Ana explains that the modifications people receive often build upon abilities they already possess, and dyslexia can be associated with strengths in visual and spatial processing. Whether or not that was the specific inspiration here, I liked the combination because it makes Din's disability and his extraordinary ability coexist rather than treating one as something that simply cancels out the other.
There is also a very ordinary and relatable motivation underneath Din's extraordinary abilities. He comes from a family without much money, he sends part of his wages home, and he wants to help his family move somewhere safer. They live close to the dangerous outer regions of the Empire, where a leviathan breach is a very real possibility. Din's career is therefore not just about ambition or solving mysteries. His family is depending on him, and his success could materially change their lives. If you have ever been in the position of trying to help your parents or improve your family's circumstances, there is something very recognisable in that pressure.
The world around Din and Ana was probably my favourite part of the book. Khanum is technologically sophisticated, but its technology is biological rather than mechanical. Things that we would accomplish with machines, electricity, construction materials, or air conditioning are accomplished through altered plants, fungi, and other organisms. A modified mushroom can cool and clean the air. Ferns can strengthen walls. Humans can be altered to improve memory, strength, mathematical ability, and other characteristics. The Empire has essentially become extraordinarily advanced at manipulating living things.
And that immediately creates another problem. Living things do not exist in isolation.
You can design an organism to perform a particular function, but once you introduce it into an ecosystem, you cannot necessarily predict how it will interact with everything already living there. You can alter something biologically and discover that the alteration has consequences nobody anticipated. Khanum has safeguards intended to prevent this, but safeguards are not infallible, and some of the most frightening elements of this world come from the knowledge that its greatest technology is also alive.
The murder mystery itself introduces us to all of this without simply stopping the story for a giant explanation of how the world works. Din is sent to investigate the bizarre death of an Imperial officer who has apparently been killed when a tree erupts from inside his body. That investigation gradually expands beyond one impossible murder and eventually takes Din and Ana to Talagray, where what initially looked like an isolated crime becomes part of something much larger.
I really enjoyed the investigation because the solution has multiple layers. I did figure out that one particular person was suspicious. I could not have told you exactly why, but every time he appeared, my brain was basically going, "There's something fishy over there." And I was right. But figuring out that one person was suspicious did not mean I had figured out the mystery. There were still several pieces I did not see coming, and the eventual solution kept unfolding rather than resting on one enormous twist.
The mystery also allows Bennett to explore corruption and the enormous difference between the people who hold power and the people who have to live with the consequences of their decisions. Wealthy families and powerful organisations can make choices that affect thousands of people, while the people harmed by those choices have very little ability to fight back. Without getting into spoilers, one revelation about why something terrible happened felt especially believable because we have seen versions of it happen in the real world. Corporations protect themselves. Powerful institutions protect themselves. When enough money and influence are involved, the question is often not whether ordinary people will be harmed, but whether harming them will cost the people responsible enough to make them care.
You do not become an enormously powerful institution by being nice.
And when something eventually does come out of the closet, the skeleton might just be leviathan-sized.
That mixture of mystery, fantasy, politics, biology, and character is what eventually pushed The Tainted Cup from four stars to five for me. The murder mystery was satisfying on its own, but it was the world surrounding the mystery that made me want more. There are so many questions Bennett has barely begun to answer. What exactly are the leviathans? Why are they coming toward the Empire? What else can biological modification do? What happens when those modifications go wrong? And how much of what Din has been taught about his own world is actually true?
I am definitely continuing with the series. The next book is A Drop of Corruption, followed by A Trade of Blood, and I am very happy to know that Din and Ana's story does not simply end there. I have other reading projects to finish first, so I may not continue immediately, but these books have gone firmly onto my list.
The Tainted Cup gave me a clever mystery, a Holmes and Watson style partnership I genuinely enjoyed, and one of the most interesting fantasy worlds I have encountered recently. I came for the murder investigation, but I finished the book wanting to know what is waiting beyond those walls, and whether the leviathans have been trying to tell everyone something all along.
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