Book Review: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
Bio-engineered fantasy mystery takes a leaf out of Nero Wolfe
Hodderscape, 2024
These suffusions weren’t pleasant—many shortened the lives of those who took them, by years if not decades, and they almost always rendered people sterile—but Sublimes were irreplaceable. It took every bit of cunning and planning to survive what came from the seas to the east each wet season.
Most sought-after were the engravers, like myself, who had been suffused to remember all they saw, acting as living libraries of information. This was the enhancement I used as I described my investigation to Ana: remembering everything, describing all I’d seen, regurgitating every piece of spoken speech in the exact same tone I’d heard it said to me. Everything I’d captured during my time in that mansion I now gave to Ana, over the course of nearly four hours.
I’d heard good things from my online writing and reading groups about The Tainted Cup. I wasn’t disappointed, and made a concerted effort to carve as much time as I could during Easter to devour this secondary world police procedural set in a galactic empire powered by biological augmentation.
This fantasy Golden-Age mystery follows Dinios Kol, investigative assistant to the wonderfully sharp-and-equally-scathing Immunis Anagosa Dolobra as he arrives at the scene of a murder most unusual. Kol, as the above quote infers, is augmented for perfect recall, which affords his superior the convenience of not actually having to ever visit the scene of the crime, no doubt inspired by Rex Stout’s 1930s armchair detective, Nero Wolfe.
Kol’s subsequent investigation reveals the inner workings of the Khanum Empire; a complex (and corrupted) web of territories and alliances, built upon the efforts of a class of engineers whose main function is to keep monstrous creatures called Leviathans from entering the Emperor’s domains.
The fantasy investigation elements of are reminiscent of Joshua Reynold’s excellent Daidoji Shin series set in the Legend of the Five Rings universe. The Tainted Cup is an absorbing read and I’m looking forward to the sequel, A Drop of Corruption, which in Jackson Bennet’s own words, was partly inspired by the United Kingdom’s handover of Hong Kong to China; a historical event I actually witnessed with my own eyes, aged 13.
For crime fans looking for something a little different, I’d give Robert Jackson Bennett’s excellent novel a go.
This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #6.
The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.
