The Tainted Cup.

Nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup marries the classic detective story with high fantasy novels, with a story narrated by the detective’s assistant (think Archie Goodwin) because the detective can’t do the leg work (think Nero Wolfe), set on a world where civilization is constantly threatened by enormous aquatic creatures called leviathans that crash through the city walls and flood the town. It’s a slow build, but Bennett sticks – pun intended here – the landing, and by the end of the novel, both of the central characters have been so well developed that it felt like the middle of a longer series.

Din is the very young, very green assistant to an investigator named Ana, and finds himself at the scene of a very bizarre death: A military official with powerful connections, Blas, has been found disemboweled, killed by a mutant plant called dappleglass that essentially kills its host by sprouting a giant tree. The corpse is impaled upon the branches when Din arrives, and he finds that the wealthy family on whose estate the murder took place is away while their servants range from uncooperative to hostile. The murder turns out to be a small piece of a much larger conspiracy that runs all the way to the top, so to speak, as Blas was just one person killed in this manner and the body count will continue to rise over the course of the story.

In the world of The Tainted Cup, people – I’m assuming they are people, at least – can be augmented in various ways that enhance certain abilities at the cost of others, or perhaps of their health, sanity, or longevity. Din is one such augmented person, called a ‘sublime’; he’s an engraver who has the equivalent of an eidetic memory, ‘engraving’ everything in a scene into his mind through the use of specific chemical scents. Ana is an eccentric, not a sublime, but with superlative powers of deduction, choosing most of the time to remain blindfolded so that she can focus better on the problem at hand. She seldom leaves her lair, never visiting the crime scene, instead sending Din out to gather the information and report back using his engraving powers, making her a fantasy heir to Nero Wolfe in multiple ways. (If only she loved orchids.) Their relationship isn’t that interesting, at least not yet, as Din is so clearly the subordinate, and is often the straight man to Ana’s barbs and witticisms, although as the novel ends, multiple small events start to shift that balance of power to a more equal one and the door to a more Nero Wolfe/Archie Griffin sort of relationship opens.

Bennett has also built a fascinating world here, where humans are at the mercy of a larger species that threatens them, and the empire’s ability to maintain order and control of its people is at least in part predicated on their ability to protect them – or persuade them that the empire is their only protection. The investigation into the murder(s) exposes a complicated back story of multiple levels of corruption and a past catastrophe that killed scores and rendered an entire canton of the empire uninhabitable, a crime that ripples through their society to this day. It’s a complex supertext above the simple narrative of the detective story, and the latter allows Bennett to give the former so much detail and texture – the investigation propels the plot forward, and no one ever stays in one place, literally or figuratively, for very long.

The Tainted Cup is more detective story than mystery, however; I don’t think the reader is supposed to figure out whodunit, given that Ana figures out the culprits over a period of time, with one of the assassins identified with probably a third of the novel to go – except, of course, they’re an accomplice rather than the mastermind. I enjoy both genres, but the detective story depends much more on the strength of the detective character(s), while the mystery is usually driven more by how clever the plot is. Bennett has created two reasonably compelling characters already, with enough interplay in the last few chapters to start the development of their relationship and foreshadow a more interesting (platonic, to be clear) one in future novels. Ana could easily have fallen, or fall in the future, into cliché; she is odd, certainly, as Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes and Poirot are, but in different ways, and she’s a stronger detective character than Inspectors Alleyn or Montalbano, to name two other series I enjoy. Din shows more growth within this specific novel, as he’s young and naïve and wedded to formal traditions that Ana finds amusing or just silly. By the time we reach the conclusion, he’s learned substantial things about himself, and found his voice in a way that was almost as satisfying to read as the solution of the main mystery itself.

Next up: I just finished Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which I fully expect to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year. I think it’s the best one and I think it checks a lot of boxes.