The tainted cup by Robert Jackson Bennet

Series: Shadow of the Leviathan (#1)

Format: 320 pages, Paperback

Published: February 13, 2024 by Hodderscape

Fantasy/own

This book was amazing. I knew it from the moment I opened it and read the first words, I knew that this will be good. It was written with such ease and skill. The words just flowed and the pages flew by. I can not do it justice. It is the kind of books where I want to tell the author what a great book it is! Like, thank you for writing it.

The world was great and strange. With modifications being done to people, with monsters called Titans being held back by sea walls and often breaking through causing havoc. With the plants being able to infect you and a bunch of other dangerous things. It was a wild world that they were trying to control.

But this is a murder mystery as investigator Ana Dolabra and her assistant Dinios Kol is called to a horrible sight. Kol is the one who is doing most of the legwork, while she is the brain. They both have skills. He can see a room and remember everything. And this horrible murder leads them to bigger things.

A great book, what more can I say than that. Loved it. I liked fantasy that is a detective story too. And the world was so fascinating.

Just read it.

In Daretana’s greatest mansion, a high imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree erupted from his body. Even here at the Empire’s borders, where contagions abound and the blood of the leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death both terrifying and impossible.

Assigned to investigate is Ana Dolabra, a detective whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities. Rumor has it that she wears a blindfold at all times, and that she can solve impossible cases without even stepping outside the walls of her home.

At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol, magically altered in ways that make him the perfect aide to Ana’s brilliance. Din is at turns scandalized, perplexed, and utterly infuriated by his new superior—but as the case unfolds and he watches Ana’s mind leap from one startling deduction to the next, he must admit that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.

As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.