Oh my goodness, you must get into this series right now. I first discovered The Tainted Cup (Book 1) thanks to Aardvark Book Club's February 2024 pick, and I was instantly pulled in. I devoured it and needed more, immediately. Bennett’s writing style is captivating. I adored Din and Ana and couldn't get enough of this herbaceous, Attack on Titan meets Sherlock Holmes fantasy world. So, when I spotted this sequel on NetGalley, I screamed. Despite my terrible review ratio, I requested it with no expectations, but a few hours later, I got the approval email and was grinning like Ana. I would've finished it that night if it weren't for my pesky day job.

This sequel has all the familiarity of an old, medieval world with a fresh and progressive twist. The way new concepts are introduced without overwhelming or spoon-feeding definitions is gorgeous. You learn about the world alongside inexperienced characters. There were so many jaw-dropping moments that I was racing through the pages to find out what happened next. I don’t want to spoil anything but trust me, you need to read this series. A physical copy of the final version will be so satisfying to add to my collection.

I’m genuinely desperate for a massive-budget adaptation and a theme park! I know this series will explode, and I’m so excited to be along for the ride. Now, the agonizing wait begins for the next one.

The biggest thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey Books for early access to this book.

<i>A Drop of Corruption</i> is funnier and sexier than <i>The Tainted Cup</i> was, and it is just as compulsively readable. I tore through this in a little more than a day, and found it infected my thoughts for all the time that I wasn't reading it. I appreciated the character development since the last book, I appreciated the drip-fed answers to the questions I had about the world, and I appreciated the atmosphere. It's a fundamentally competent mystery novel, with no plot holes or reliance on stupidity and no massive leaps of logic, which is not something I take for granted.

If I had to describe what a "Watson and Holmes" dynamic is, it's in the split between action and thought. Our Watson character goes and interacts with the world, bringing information back to a Holmes character who does the thinking (what the philosopher Daniel Dennett would call the difference between syntactic and semantic processing). This series represents the platonic ideal of a Sherlock Holmes story. Din, our narrator, is the essence of Watson, biologically modified to remember everything he sees and be able to report it perfectly, and he is all action. Ana, his boss and our Holmes figure, is the opposite: all thought, while she sits in a low-stimulation room and compiles information. The fun thing about this is that while Din isn't always able to figure out the mysteries, he has compiled all the information that Ana uses to do so, and so the reader is theoretically given enough to figure things out ourselves. I think that this book did that really well: several times, I could feel the edges of what the solutions were, but I never really figured every last bit out in advance, so the solutions felt like they made sense and like I could have figured them out if I was just as smart as Ana was.

The worldbuilding of the series continues to be excellent. There's real body horror in the ways that infections are described and everything is just weird enough to be fascinating. I really appreciated that the technology felt internally consistent, that nothing felt like it was breaking laws of physics or biology. I missed the commentary from the first book about the ways that the rich profit off of ecological disaster and condemn whole populations and lands for greed; instead there was commentary about the stupidity of non-democratic political systems, which felt relevant (in the Author's Note, Bennett talks about how the book is a reaction to authoritarianism in our world), but which felt less pointed and specific than the stuff in <i>The Tainted Cup</i>. The Empire of Khanum itself is an odd beast in that it doesn't really behave the ways that most empires, fictional or historical, do–it doesn't want to expand for the sake of expansion, it rejects notions of the central power and importance of the emperor, it works hard to crack down on corruption, it actively empowers its citizens to define what the empire is through their work. This makes it more or less the good guys in comparison to a monarchic system that still practices slavery, which muddled some of the ideas I got from the first book, where the damaging side of Empire seemed more on show.

I commented in my review of the first book that Din had absolutely no sense of humour, and it's really nice to see a version of the character that now does have a sense of humour and is no longer terrified of having his secrets discovered. There's a lot more sex, and while it's not graphically described or particularly erotic, it is a source of character development and humour and the book benefits from it. Ana gets more dimension, too, and by comparison with some other inhumanly weird characters she becomes more understandable.

I'm going to keep reading the rest of this series. I'm confident that all my questions will eventually be answered and that those answers are going to be satisfactorily weird. More than anything, based on the first two books, I'm confident that the journey is going to be fun.

I would take 50 more books in this series if I could. The world building is so unique, the characters are so enjoyable to read, and the mysteries unravel perfectly. Give us more!