Review: The Tainted Cup

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I very much liked this author's previous series, and this, although in a new setting, contains the same factors that I enjoyed in those books. Most obviously, a very high-concept setting that enables a plot to work that wouldn't work anywhere else, but also somewhat morally compromised characters who are doing their best to do the right thing in a corrupt and even dystopian world. (Dystopian would normally be an automatic "no" from me, but when it's done this well - and is in the background rather than the foreground - it works.)

Enormous kaiju, who grow bigger each year, emerge from the ocean every wet season, and the might of the Empire is concentrated on keeping them from breaking through to the heartlands. And yet that's not what the book is about. Instead, it forms a suspenseful background to a murder mystery that could only happen in this world, where the bizarre mutagenic properties of the kaiju corpses are used to modify plants, animals, and humans in the cause of the anti-kaiju battle (and also for everyday purposes like building houses).

The protagonist is a young "engraver", whose alteration gives him an eidetic memory. He assists an eccentric, foul-mouthed but highly intelligent investigator who's in pursuit of a murderer with an unusual weapon: a modified plant that sprouts inside its victims and grows suddenly, killing them and destroying things in their vicinity. And soon enough, there are more victims, and this time they're engineers working on the walls that keep the kaiju out, and a wall is damaged, making it vulnerable, and now the stakes are even higher, and the pressing question is: will imperial power politics prevent the mystery from being solved and justice from being done?

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review, and apart from a few mostly minor errors and the usual overabundance of coordinate commas where they don't belong, it's cleanly edited (with a couple of months to go before publication still). While it has a dark and ugly side to the story that isn't to my personal taste, and which therefore kept it out of the Platinum tier of my Best of the Year list, it's thoroughly well constructed, compelling, and conveys a fascinating world and characters who have both internal and external struggles to cope with. Highly recommended.

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