I received a free ARC from NetGalley.

An Agatha Christie-style murder mystery set in a fantasy world sounded good to me but just did not end up working for me. I liked the mystery aspect but the world-building was kind of confusing and vague. There are giant "leviathans" that come out of the sea and will destroy the realm, if the Empire didn't defend against them. But these beasts are practically mountain sized, and if they get past the sea walls it seems they just wander onto the plains and then... what? The author didn't seem to assign malice or even thought to the leviathans. Maybe just move out of the way instead of spending all the effort on walls and cannons?
And the people/races. They have various alterations due to plant compounds that give them greater memory or strength or vision or whatever, but the descriptions of the races etc. just didn't build much of a picture in my mind. All I can visualize is that some of them have gray skin because that got mentioned a lot.

This was such an intriguing read. I really enjoyed the mystery and the world. Ana Dolabra is strange and insightful. Her new apprentice must deal with her eccentricities as they are pulled into the world of politics and murder. In a world with leviathans and killer plants, murder may be the thing that destroys their world.

Robert Jackson Bennett creates worlds that draw you in. From his dedication you know that he was influenced by his mother and grandmother to write a murder mystery. Of course, if it's a novel by Bennett then his world will include magic and some very unusual way of looking at the world. Even the murder is very different: in this case, the victim was killed by a tree growing throughout his body.
Dinios Kol is a new engraver, a magical enhancement which gives him total recall of what he is looking at (or hearing or smelling). Assigned to the Empire's greatest detective, Ana Dolabra, he is just getting used to her. Ana prefers to send her engraver out to crime scenes and then have him tell her all about it. She often blindfolds herself so that she can concentrate better, and it doesn't take long before she (and Din) realizes that there is a lot more going on than just one particular murder.
The Empire they inhabit is divided into rings, the farther away from the capital (and closest to the sea) you are, the less safe you are from Leviathans which have been known to breach the defenses and bring destruction to the land. Complications ensue when there is a major break in the sea wall and every mystery that is solved seems to lead to another mystery. This seems to be the beginning of a series and after this first volume, readers will eagerly look forward to the next book.

Anything Robert Jackson Bennett writes is an auto-buy from me, and even though I know to expect his typically stellar mix of action, characterization, and canny plotting, I’m always delightfully surprised by his ability to innovate within the fantasy genre. Previously in his Founders Trilogy, he managed to make computer and software engineering work in a fantasy setting. Now with The Tainted Cup, he’s working with biohacking and genetic engineering, all set within a world of swords, carriages—and leviathans lurking in the seas.

The world is vaguely Roman, with plenty of references to legions and a emperor (and an appropriate refusal to use the letter J), but Bennett wisely let us fill in the blanks, letting the color seep in naturally. He’s more interested in the divergent elements, most notably the bio-magic and the threat of kaiju-like attacks, and lets those take a central role in the unfolding murder mystery.

We begin with one death, that of a high-ranked official visiting a home of one of the empire’s wealthiest families. An assassination within the inner corridors of the highly-guarded compound is bad enough, but the murder weapon is even more unsettling: some kind of spore or cutting made it past the wards, and then erupted through the official’s body, its hyper-accelerated growth tearing him to bits.

Dinios Kol seems, at first, like an ordinary bureaucrat, inexperienced but eager to prove himself when he begins investigating this bizarre crime. He is given this task not because of any great skill on his part, but because he is an engraver, a magically-enhanced individual who is incapable of forgetting any detail. Once he observes it, Din can perfectly recall the details of any scene, conversation, or other experience.

There’s never a convenient time for murder, but these murders may not only have come at the worst possible time, they may have caused it. The sudden deaths of multiple engineers causes a breach in the empire-encircling wall, the first and main line of defense against the leviathans, and therefore puts the entire empire at risk. Solving this potential case of sabotage is paramount, and Din and his superior Ana race to investigate even as the legions race to enact last-ditch defenses.

The foulmouthed, irrepressible Ana is certainly a Holmesian character in the sense that she is a keen observer and ardent proponent of deductive reasoning—and has a penchant for big reveals. But whereas Sherlock Holmes is devoted to criminology and gets all grumpy and cocaine-y when deprived of murder-puzzles, Ana is not so narrow in her obsessions. She is interested in absolutely everything: the angle of gradation of the road, the mercantile trends of previous centuries, the exact way Din makes tea. Ana wants all available data, and there is some question whether her indiscriminate pursuit of knowledge is actively useful, relatively harmless, or a problematic sign of apophenia.

Pointing toward the problematic are Ana’s ample flaws: she’s profoundly anti-social, hypersensitive to stimuli, and has about as much tact as a drunk toddler. (NB: Geekly Inc. does not condone underage drinking.) In other words, she’s delightful. I love her, and I love her dynamic with the long-suffering Din, who is by turns exasperated and awed by her abilities.

Din, too, is a delight, though it takes a bit longer for his natural reserve to become endearing. He’s an avatar of the plot before he asserts his own idiosyncrasies, perhaps a necessary delay since Bennett crams a lot of detail into this book. There’s a significant cast in terms of both breadth and depth of characters, multiple locations, multiple lines of inquiry, and maybe even multiple perpetrators. It’s a hugely complex undertaking that Bennett works hard to keep contained for us, and he succeeds admirably. Once I had a handle on the world itself, I had no trouble following the complexities and twists.

The prose was at times a bit teeter-tottery, vacillating between a slightly stilted formality circa the 1930s and a modern cadence. It felt like Bennett had absorbed the entire classic mystery genre (especially the Nero Wolfe cannon, according to the afterward) as research, and was veering into it now and then by accident. But it’s a very small thing, really. The mystery carries the narrative swiftly along, as twisting and layered as you could ask for.

With great characters and a breathless narrative pace, I couldn’t help myself from racing through The Tainted Cup in a few short days. I loved being immersed in its fully-realized, intricate world and the nested mysteries that encompassed everything from imperial machinations to intimate moments of connection, and I was despondent when I finished it and had no sequels to jump into (yet!). This is—no surprise—another stellar novel to add to my—and hopefully your—RJB shelf.

What if, Robert Jackson Bennett proposes, Attack on Titan existed with Pacific Rim-esque Kaiju's in place of man-eating Titans? And Sherlock Holmes was also there? Let your imagine run wild with this, and you've basically got the backdrop for RJB's sensational new murder mystery novel. In a world where massive terrifying seabeasts threaten the coasts and humans shelter within concentric walls, buildings are constructed from ferns and vines that poison intruders, and alluring flowers allow for fantastical human augments, RJB unrolls an unexpectedly classic murder mystery in the style of Conan Doyle and Christie.

The world-building is classic RJB, which is to say bar none, packed with detail and style and intrigue. I was especially fascinated by his system of grafts, in which humans known as Sublimes allow themselves to be poisoned in order to develop certain abilities - some seek strength by growing into massive, shambling "Cracklers", while others buy sixty seconds of speed to become incomparable assassins, or "Twitches". My favorite augment was also the most well-developed: our protagonist is an Engraver, someone who uses certain scents to encode and recall information eidetically. As a psychology grad student, I was obsessed with this fun take on a real psychological phenomenon, in which sense of smell is the strongest evoker of memory due to being located very near certain memory centers in the brain.

The characters being great fun was almost a bonus after the ingenuity of the world-building, but RJB has found an incomparable duo in Ana and Din, a pseudo Holmes and Watson, the former being a slightly kooky and utterly infamous investigator, and the latter a wide-eyed everyman thrust into a throughly unfamiliar world through being her assistant. Together, they are fantastic guides to a brilliant work of genre-bending fiction, which will surely evolve into a series worthy of note.

Okay this was not at all what I expected.. With words in the lede like eccentric, magic, sparkling, fantasy, and classic crime novel I was lots of exciting world building and action and early engagement. What I found was none of those things. The writing style just didn't work for me here and I never felt drawn into the story in the way that I wanted to. Ultimately I was unable to finish...

Please, please, please read this! It's just so incredibly fun and engaging. Robert Jackson Bennett crafts such clever stories. And his characters!! How could I come to love our heroes Din and Ana so much in such a short time? Din's voice and perspective guide us through the downright alien empire full of augmentations and monstrous leviathans. Meanwhile, Ana is a genius who's quirks and mysterious past make for a compelling mentor. The whole murder/assassination plot was the perfect spring board. It stayed completely central to the plot but revealed so many other threads that I can see will have their own stories throughout the rest of the series. The magic system was utterly fascinating and unique but also fairly unsettling (at least in terms of body horror.) I read this book in about a day and I didn't want it to end. This one will definitely end up in my top 3 or 5 books read this year.
Thank you so much to Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group/Ballantine/Del Rey for the opportunity to get an early reader copy of this book! It was such a lovely surprise and has gone a long way to getting me out of a minor reading slump I was experiencing.

This definitely sucked me in and I am looking forward to the full series!
Especially since the book does not come out for a long while yet, I'll try to focus just on the vibes and why you should want to pick this up.

<b>What is this book like?:</b>
The most clear and present inspiration is a detective series with a Sherlock/Watson sort of partnership where the Sherlock is manic (but genius) and a bit of a recluse and therefore depends upon the Watson to be their eyes and ears in the world, as well as occasionally ask questions so that the Sherlock can convey their deductions to the reader.

There are elements that reminded me of Scott Wesserfeld's Leviathan series (particularly the name of this series, the large beasts, and the scientific~magical alterations to organic lifeforms) and elements akin to something more like Attack on Titan or even season 2 of Heroes.

As the first book in the series, it certainly seeds suggestions of the great world and its history and corruption and secrets and wonders. But as a Sherlock/Watson based story first and foremost, it focuses on the murder mystery.

<b>The Mystery:</b>
I read a lot of murder mysteries as a child-- so many that I got too good at picking up the clues and solving them from the moment a throwaway detail was mentioned; which made me largely grow bored and give up on the genre. What I liked about this is that it had a series of clues conveyed to the reader that I could conjecture from, but also a lot of instances where the reader doesn't have time to know/unravel... however we get to watch the characters being clever.

And I <i>love</i> to read a character being clever. The way that they're able to observe the scene (giving me more and more world-building details) but also compile a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts is delicious to me.

<b>Characters:</b>
While oftentimes the characters seem over-powered, Bennett has also introduced a number of weaknesses-- some that came up here, some that are seeded to come up in future books to further limit their powers.

I will say that Ana is the weakest character to me. While she curses often and is prone to excitable outbursts, her character was the most incongruous and could use a little further refining to give me a clearer picture of who she is instead of just a larger than life caricature.

<b>The Themes:</b>
This is my third series by Robert Jackson Bennett and especially as we got to the end and more and more things were coming together, I could clearly see that this is the same author. There are details from page 1 that are very similar to his other books, but the themes in particular are ones that come up often in his work. Luckily they're themes that I like! But if it's something you've found you didn't get on with in his past works, I don't think this will be a huge departure.

<b>Overall:</b>
The novel kept my intrigue levels up, gave me lots of suspects and clues, explained a lot of the magic system, started growing my understanding of the Empire, and gave a satisfying resolution to all that had been built up. I was able to visualize the action scenes and a lot of the investigation, and there were a few moments of horrific ick thrown in as well.

Meanwhile there were several scenes that honestly had me laughing out loud and then I'd recount the whole or specific dialogue to my partner. And that, to me, is always a sign of a damn good book.

Now I just need to convince someone else with an arc to read it so I have somebody to talk about it with...

<i>I was granted an ARC by Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine, Del Rey in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.</i>

What struck me most about "The Tainted Cup", was the world that we are immediately thrust into from the very first page. The relationships are quite obviously why we want to stick around, but the odd, strange, relatable world is something that kept me coming back for more. The small details being played to word workers, the looming threats in the distance, the social hierarchies. This is a book that feels like stepping onto an entirely different planet, while also understanding that their problems are problems that we still have right here under our own two feet.

In The Tainted Cup, our narrator, Din, finds himself at the center of a murder investigation, as he assists the eccentric and brilliant Ana Dolabra. The murder in question is particularly gruesome- death by rapidly sprouting tree through the body- and all eyes might have been on the investigation if it weren't for the other problem of encroaching leviathans. Din and Ana travel to the frontlines to investigate similar murders, revealing a bigger conspiracy, using Din's memory enhancement and Ana's remarkable powers of observation.

The Tainted Cup does not sound like the kind of book I would have chosen for myself, though the Holmes and Watson comparison always piques my interest. However, when I had the chance to read the ARC of this book, I found so much to love.

The characters are interesting and unique. All too often, I read a book where characters could be interchangeable and I find it difficult to distinguish between them. That is not the case for the characters in The Tainted Cup. Not only are they clearly distinguishable from each other, but they are also unique among characters from other books (even Watson and Holmes). The mystery itself is compelling and though clues are laid throughout, it takes a particularly astute observer to catch them all. The worldbuilding is seamlessly intertwined with the mystery, laying out the elements that push this story into fantasy without distracting from the mystery at its heart.

A commentary on power, society, and belonging, The Tainted Cup is a great introduction to a new world and (hopefully) long series of mysteries to come. I can't wait to read more.

Din is a newly apprenticed assistant to Ana Dolabra, an investigator with highly eccentric habits. Din has been magicked to have a perfect recall, which he uses to serve his investigator’s eyes and ears out in the world. But when his first job involves a highly unusual murder, even in a world with bio-engineered magic and rampaging Leviathans, Din and Ana are packed up and sent to solve a series of remarkably similar murders. But can they solve it before they’re next?

RJB cheekily described this as A Game of Thrones and Knives Out, which is not untrue. We have a political fantasy with a fair amount of body horror combined with a detective story. There are obviously some Holmes-Watson vibes as well along with Attack on Titan.

I really enjoyed the unusual setting combined with a layered mystery, so much so that I stayed up late to read it. It strikes an unusual but welcome balance where we get a full story arc in this first volume but a really interesting world and cast of characters that obviously have more stories. I honestly can’t wait to read the next.

And that cover– gorgeous!

A delightful and intriguing mystery that keeps expanding and unfolding until the very end. The Tainted Cup is a fun and absorbing read!

It took me a few chapters to really get into it, understand the world and the main characters, and follow along as brilliant detective Ana and her equally brilliant (in different and complementary ways) assistant Din try to solve a murder...and then more murders. The have great (platonic) chemistry and their scenes together are some of the best in the book.

Recommended to anyone looking for an exciting and compelling fantasy/murder mystery mash-up. Thank you very much to Ballantine and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy. I'm already looking forward to the next book in this series.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Murder, bribery, deception, corruption and above all, the comedy that is Ana Dolabra.

In a world where individuals receive alterations to their mind and body to further their careers, we meet Din, an Engraver which means he remembers everything around him, down to every last detail or tone of voice. He is newly an assistant to Ana - an odd genius investigator in the Empire, known for her quirky and abnormal ways of doing things. Imagine Sherlock Holmes in female form. Din is investigating his first murder case and possibly one of the most gruesome he will see, as a tree has sprouted from inside the body of an officer tearing him in pieces extended on the branches. The deeper Ana and Din get into this case, they discover that more may be involved, including those higher up in the Empire.

I’ve read Robert Jackson Bennett previously, and truly enjoy his writing. It is easy to read and Ana as the comedic relief had me audibly laughing throughout the book. The way Ana put together the clues was so much fun to follow, I imagine writing this took a lot of brain power because I was always shocked with all of the reveals and the explanations Ana would give on how she got there. This was such a fun read and may be one of the best books I’ve read this year. I can’t wait for this series to continue!

Thank you NetGalley and Random House Publishing for an ARC of this book!

this was a really fun novel. ana, an investigator, and her assistant din are assigned to a perplexing case. a dead man has been found with plants growing from within his body. their investigation takes them upon a perilous journey.

this is well written, interesting, but the dialogue does feel a bit stunted at times. i did not care for the romance aspect, but that's just me. if you like sci-fi/fantasy adventures, mystery, and occult magic on a fictional continent, this is the book for you.

thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

Oh, I really enjoyed this one.

There is nothing that excites me more than a fresh new world to explore in a book, and the world of The Tainted Cup is brilliantly woven into the story and would have brought me back to the series even if I had disliked plot (which I did not, because the plot is also very well done). This is a story in which enormous, eldritch monsters try to walk a path to the heart of a country protected by its skill in biological mutation and massive walls and this fact is not the main thrust of the case our heroes are trying to solve. While the murder investigation does eventually begin tying into larger events occurring in the world, the way it does so cleverly focuses our attention inward to the matters at hand and kind of obscures all else, even as the potential for disaster looms over everyone.

I loved this, and think that many readers of Bennett's past works will find many of the touches that they have come to love about the other books he has written in this book too. New readers may also find this a great jumping on point to the series and other series that Bennett has written.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was a fantasy murder-mystery set in a society the engineers plants for building, defense, and human augmentation and fights off kaiju at its walls - definitely a unique setting. SciFi/Fantasy and mystery are two of my favorite genes, so this felt right up my alley. While I enjoyed this, I honestly find myself confused at why I didn't like it even more than I did. The world building was strong, and the author gave me a setting that I hadn't ever seen anything like before. The mystery was just convoluted enough, and the characters were interesting, but it just didn't hook me in the way my favorite books do. At times, the Sherlock Holmes-like detective, Ana's antics were a bit too much. I realize she's supposed to be an over-the-top character, just shy of a madwoman, but even so, I felt like the author leaned on this a bit too heavily. I did like that the story was not about the people on the wall fighting the kaiju, but everyone else trying to support the Empire and get along in this society, the typical citizens, if you will. In summary, I liked the story and the characters, but I didn't love it. This was my first book by this author, and it did make me curious to read more of his work. I wish I had a better answer for why it didn't grip me more, but I'm curious to read more of his work because I suspect I will find something there that does. My recommendation would be that if you like SciFi/Fantasy and mystery, this is worth a read for the unique world building alone.

It was such a. Fun mystery. I love the characters and the pacing could’ve been better but it worked out at the end!

This is an interesting book, I don't think I've ever read anything like it before. The characters were really interesting and the world that was created was one I was drawn into.

Thank you @netgally for the ARC of The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett.

This book is great for mystery and fantasy lovers alike. It is a unique take on a murder mystery. There are a lot of twists and turns to keep the reader guessing. I enjoyed the magical aspects of the book.

When a prominent member of society is found dead, Ana Dolabra and her assistant Dinios Kol are sent to investigate. The case becomes interesting when a tree forms out of the body. The detectives are dealing with not only murder, but a magical disease or poison. Dolabra is a unique detective in that she investigates blindfolded and doesn't leave her house. As she works to solve the mystery, many more secrets are revealed.

Let me say first, sci-fi is not one of my favorites. I enjoyed this book so much. It was a slow go, for reading, so many names and strange things happening, but over all a really good whodunnit. If you enjoy a twisted thriller with a side of strange, you will love this one. A definite must read.