The Tainted Cup
A Novel
-
-
4.6 • 500 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
HUGO AWARD WINNER • WORLD FANTASY AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A Holmes and Watson–style detective duo take the stage in this fantasy with a mystery twist, from acclaimed author Robert Jackson Bennett
“Like an endearing fantasy version of Knives Out . . . A great murder mystery is hard to pull off, but Bennett structures his perfectly.”—T. J. Klune, The New York Times
“Combines the best of Lovecraft and Doyle.”—Matt Dinniman, New York Times bestselling author of Dungeon Crawler Carl
“A masterpiece.”—Hideo Kojima, legendary videogame creator of the Metal Gear series
LOCUS AWARD FINALIST • EDGAR AWARD NOMINEE • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Elle, BookPage
In Daretana’s greatest mansion, a high imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree erupted from his body. Even here at the Empire’s borders, where contagions abound and the blood of the leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death both terrifying and impossible.
Assigned to investigate is Ana Dolabra, a detective whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities. Rumor has it that she wears a blindfold at all times, and that she can solve impossible cases without even stepping outside the walls of her home.
At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol, magically altered in ways that make him the perfect aide to Ana’s brilliance. Din is at turns scandalized, perplexed, and utterly infuriated by his new superior—but as the case unfolds and he watches Ana’s mind leap from one startling deduction to the next, he must admit that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.
As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens 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.
By an “endlessly inventive” (Vulture) author with a “wicked sense of humor” (NPR), The Tainted Cup mixes the charms of detective fiction with brilliant world-building to deliver a fiendishly clever mystery that’s at once instantly recognizable and thrillingly new.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bennett (the Founders trilogy) brilliantly melds genres in this exceptional mystery-fantasy, the first in his Shadow of the Leviathan series. Dinios Kol has been tapped to serve as the new assistant to Ana Dolabra, an eccentric investigator with a reputation for solving cases blindfolded and without leaving her home. Dolabra's recently been reassigned from the Khanum Empire's richest enclaves to a dull backwater, where she and Kol get a knotty problem to untangle. Kol, whose prior experience consists of investigating pay fraud in the Khanum military, is dispatched to the scene of an unnatural death at the estate of the Haza clan, one of the wealthiest in the land, who mysteriously maintain a house out in the sticks. Commander Taqtasa Blas was found in a guest bedroom with some leafy trees sprouting through his body. Blas, a friend of the Hazas, had a reputation for harassing the estate's female staff. Kol uses magic fluid to "engrave" the crime scene, impressing every detail on his mind to relate to his superior. Dolabra is intrigued by the apparently supernatural killing and sets about using her superior deductive skills to identify the killer. The worldbuilding is immediately involving, Bennett's take on a classic detective duo dynamic feels fresh and exciting, and the mystery itself twists and turns delightfully. Readers will be wowed.
Customer Reviews
Wonderful
A phenomenal world that thrums and quakes in your brain long after you read it.
Falls short of Wolfe
I picked this up on a recommendation to take a break from Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels, so imagine my surprise to see Stout’s Wolfe in the blurbs and acknowledgments. The formula has been lifted wholesale, but tweaked well enough that the characters themselves feel unique and don’t invite undue comparison on themselves.
Unfortunately Bennett lacks Stout’s pure rhetorical muscle, delivering adequate prose but sparse bon mots. More troublesome is that the mystery itself is not very mysterious, with clues being telegraphed obviously enough that nothing in the reveal was particularly surprising, and in one case I even identified a perpetrator before their crime had been revealed to the reader. In fairness, I suspect that it’s much harder to plant clues in plain sight in a fantasy novel, where everything about the setting needs to be made explicit.
A great read
If you like a good mystery in a Sherlock Holmes style, with a flair of fantasy then this is the book for you.