Hugo Ballot Review: The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett

Hugo Ballot Review: The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett

by Rich Horton

This is the fourth of the 2025 Hugo finalists for Best Novel that I have read. Robert Jackson Bennett is a writer I have heard of before, but have never read. His first novel came out in 2009, and he has received a good deal of attention for his work -- two novels, Mr. Shivers and American Elsewhere, won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, and two of his series (Divine Cities and The Founders) have been finalists for the Hugo for Best Series. The Tainted Cup is the first book in a new series, Shadow of the Leviathan. (The second book in the series, A Drop of Corruption, has already appeared this year.) It is a fantasy detective novel, and I'll confess that I was happy to hear that -- it sounds like fun. (And I recently read another fantasy detective novel, Lisa Tuttle's The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief.)

The narrator is one Dinios Kol, who has recently been appointed Assistant Investigator to the Iudex Investigator for Daretana, a remote canton of the Kahnum Empire. This investigator is Anagosa Dolabra, a decidely eccentric woman of middle years. Din, meanwhile, is a youngish man, though a bit old to still be an apprentice -- his appointment as Ana's assistant is conditional, dependent upon successful completion of his apprenticeship. 

The current investigation is of a spectacular murder -- the first exciting assignment Din has had. (The first four months of his time with Ana involved tedious dealings with financial fraud cases.) Ana has a disability -- she is unable to tolerate excessive sensory stimulation, and she spends most of her time in her rooms, often blindfolded. So it is up to Din to handle the physical investigation -- but he does have one ability that will help -- he is an "engraver", and has perfect memory of everything he sees and hears, so can report precise details to Ana. This ability is due to an "apothetikal" modification -- a sort of fantastical plant based biotechnology. There are many such modifications, mostly used by the Iyalets, the four main branches of Empire service: Din's branch, the Iudex, are the criminal investigators; the Apothetikals are the masters of biotech; the Engineers maintain the Empire's infrastructure, and the Legion is the military. Apothetikal modifications include tremendous strength, enhanced vision, great powers of calculation, and many more. 

What Din finds in this investigation is that a certain Commander Blas of the Engineers had been visiting a house owned by the Hazas, a powerful "Gentry" family; and that suddenly a plant "bloomed" inside his body, killing him horribly. This plant is "dapplegrass", which grows so quickly that when it was first invented it destroyed an entire canton before it was contained. Ana and Din soon learn that in the neighboring canton of Talagray ten more engineers have been killed, also by dapplegrass, and some of them were working on the seawall that protects the Empire from being overrun by the incredibly huge leviathans in the oceans. It's very clear that these murders must be solved quickly, especially since the breach in the seawall caused by the dapplegrass blooming within it leaves Talagray vulnerable to a leviathan -- and the wet season, when the leviathans approach the shore, is upon them. 

Ana and Din head to Talagray, and start investigating, even as more murders are discovered. There is clearly some sort of conspiracy at hand, and there are plenty of suspects, including the Haza family, a cabal of Engineers, discontented exiles from the canton that had been overrun by the dappleglas, and even potentially members of the team assembled to help with the investigation. Din continues to perform the active work of crime scene examinations and interrogations, while Ana analyzes what is found, makes brilliant deductions, and strategizes next steps. It is a true race against time, and we get to know Din and Ana better and better, as Din makes some remarkable discoveries about his own abilities, and we get hints of a past for Ana. Of course they do solve the crime(s) -- and the solutions are pretty satisfactory (though there is some coincidence, and perhaps Ana's deductions are somewhat implausibly brilliant.) 

The real fun of the book is the mismatched pair at its center. Ana is a pure delight -- cranky and demanding but funny and honest; while we really come to like Din, a poor boy making good despite personal difficulties. Other characters -- especially the fiercely honest military veteran Tazi Miljin, and Din's love interest Kepheus Strovi (they don't get together until the end but I could see from when they first met where that was going) are interesting as well. The magical* inventions are neat too -- Din's special abilities, the various apothetikal modifications, the nature of the leviathans, the scary "twitch" -- really well done. 

Where does it rank on my Hugo ballot so far? Roughly third out of four -- pretty much on a level with T. Kingfisher's A Sorceress Comes to Call but behind Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay; with the difference coming down mainly to science fictional interest and ambition. All four of the novels so far have been at least very enjoyable reads. 

*(I can easily imagine this book recast as science fiction -- what is presented as magic here could have been given a scientific justification, admittedly not a terribly convincing one.)