“The Tainted Cup” by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Perhaps it is a wise thing, to prepare for death every day, just as the Empire prepares for death every wet season.”

I inhaled two books by Robert Jackson Bennett over the last week and a half, and both were excellent. I think I can call myself a fan now.

“Oh, people love the Legion, with their swords and their walls and their bombards. But though they receive no worship, it’s the maintenance folk who keep the Empire going. Someone, after all, must do the undignified labor to keep the grand works of our era from tumbling down.”

The setting is wonderful – a vast Empire where graft alterations of people for specific tasks and traits is common, and the borders of which are guarded by the colossal sea walls that are attacked every season by even more colossal Leviathans, and strange outwardly contagions abound, and where there’s a delicate interplay between politics and plain survival in the place that seems precariously perched on the edge of utter catastrophes all the time. And in this delightfully complex and well-realized setting we have a fascinating murder mystery that – of course – is only a part of grander scale events as our narrator Din, an apprentice assistant to an eccentric and brilliant investigator Ana, starts on his first murder case — that of an Empire official gruesomely murdered by a huge plant erupting from his body.

It’s very clever and addictingly interesting, and develops this world so well that I felt completely engrossed and absorbed in it. The plot moves along snappily without ever sagging, and the point is not the whodunit (that Bennett leaves enough clues to figure out) but the details of the plot and the complex picture of the world they build puzzle piece by puzzle piece. And I loved the interplay between our protagonists built on the contrasts that are wonderfully complementary – a pragmatic and level-headed apprentice youngster and a brilliant and cynical mad genius a few steps ahead of everyone, but never irritatingly so.

“For the Empire is huge. Complex. Often unwieldy and slow. And in many places, weak. A massive colossus, stretching out across the cantons, one in whose shadow we all live … and yet it is prone to wounds, infections, fevers, and ill humors. But its strangest feature is that the more its citizens feel it is broken, the more broken it actually becomes.”

This is a book that would be so much fun to reread for the sake of the details that will now stand out more as I know the plot resolution.

Fantastically delightful. 5 stars.

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Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group -Ballantine, Del Rey for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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