Book Review: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

Quick unrelated dump about my childhood fear here: It's common in my part of the world to discourage children from eating seeds of fruit by telling them that if they do, a tree would grow start growing inside of them and eventually makes it way out. Why am I telling you this? Because this book starts that way, there's a graphic death cause by a plant exploding from the inside of and through a commander. The protagonist is Kol, the assistant of Ana Dolabara, a strange woman who lives with a blindfold and never leaves her place.

This is a fun, fantastic and comforting murder mystery that is fast paced. It starts with a simple looking death that soon unfolds into far reaching consequences. In some places I felt like the author relied a bit too heavily on the Holmes and Watson dynamic and character types throughout the story, and the sider characters involved lacked personality beyond a dimension, and there were minor moments where the treatment of the story swerves from having suspense as Kol works on the mystery, and in building tension by dropping hindsight in his narration. Anyway, those are very minor complaints and I enjoyed reading this.

So, the major plus here is the weird and gruesome world this takes place in, and I assure you that no matter how you feel about reading murder mysteries, this is worth a read for that aspect alone. There are mountainous leviathans that head inland on a rampage at the start of the wet season, and the empire has to resort to all kinds of machinations and sets of huge walls to keep the citizens safe. There is plenty of exposure to this concept through the plot, but is also seen through the protagonist's backstory as well. The death that kick starts the book happens at the start of the wet season, and adds an impending sense of danger to the implications of their finds in the case.

But, that's not what I thought was the best part. The creepiest and most intriguing part of the world is the plants and the body and mind alterations they help bring about. Plants are shown to have industrial uses, but the humans in the empire can also alter themselves with specific ones. Kol, for example, is an engraver who has his mind altered with a specific plant that gives him the equivalent of a kind of eidetic memory, and there are others who use certain others to grow extra muscle, so that they can defend the territory and shores from the monsters if needed. This is but a small sample of the macabre world created by the author.