Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bennett's wonderfully clever and compulsively readable sequel to 2024's The Tainted Cup offers another winning blend of fantasy and classic detection, featuring off-beat sleuths who call to mind Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin but operate in a realm under constant threat of destruction from eldritch marine creatures known as the leviathans. Ana Dolabra, "a woman so brilliant she lives most of her days blindfolded and rarely leaves her rooms, for fear that common life shall overwhelm her mind," and her legman, Dinios Kol, who has been genetically augmented with the ability to perfectly recall what he sees and hears, are the Khanum Empire's go-to case-cracking duo. Bennett again gives them a baffling murder to solve: Immunis Mineti Sujedo, part of a Treasury delegation on a high-stakes mission, vanished from his locked room, only for his partial remains to surface five days later. The investigators must ascertain how he disappeared, who killed him, and why. Other deaths follow, muddying the waters. Bennett skillfully integrates humor and magic into the complex puzzle plot and plays fair with planting clues for the reader. Randall Garrett fans will be hooked. (Apr.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Following their first twisty case of murder and political corruption (chronicled in The Tainted Cup), Ana and Din are sent to the opposite fringe of the Empire to solve what appears to be a classic locked-room murder mystery. But no case that Special Investigations sends their most special team to is ever that simple. The moment that eccentric senior investigator Ana is on the scene, she knows that the case is about something no one wants to admit; it's all misdirection for a plot decades in the making, involving sleeper agents, ambitious officers, and corruption of both the body and the soul, all in service of a goal no one remembers except the man who has been enslaved to it for his entire life. VERDICT This Holmes and Watson-like investigative duo are compelling to follow, and the truly epic fantasy world where the series is set, with its falling empire, corrupt politics, and magic pharmacopeia engineered from monster blood, takes the familiarity of mystery and creates a truly fantastic fever-dream of a world and a story.--Marlene Harris
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Things are not what they seem in a place where leviathans roam the land and plots against the empire flourish. Part fantasy, part procedural, the second installment in Bennett's Shadow of the Leviathan series--followingThe Tainted Cup (2024)--finds Dinios Kol, the much put upon assistant to investigator Ana Dolabra (rhymes with abracadabra), investigating a murder on the far edges of the Empire of Khanum. Ana is "a woman so brilliant [that] she lives most of her days blindfolded and rarely leaves her rooms, for fear that common life shall overwhelm her mind." That leaves it up to Din to try to piece together what happened to an unfortunate servant of the empire whose body is turning up in bits and pieces--understandable, perhaps, since the man worked for the tax division of the imperial treasury, "here to confer with the king of Yarrow onhigh imperial business," as a local flatfoot, Malo, tells him. It's a grisly affair, all severed hands and disembowelment, "as if all the organs had been scooped out by a giant spoon," and Din has a sensitive tummy. That drop of corruption in the title has nothing to do with the fact that when Ana arrives on the scene she feasts on a pile of raw shellfish. No, the corruption has to do with the ability of the Empire's folks to alter bodies with all manner of tools and potions and such, and when they concoct a plan to inject "ossuary moss" into bone marrow to keep Din and his fellow "engravers" from going bonkers, Ana's antennae go up--and even more so when the aforementioned king turns up "dead as a fucking boiled scallop." Red herrings--some in various stages of rot--abound as Ana, Din, and Malo sort out all the nefarious doings. A grand entertainment, as ever with Bennett's richly imaginative yarns. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
