Yes, Robert Jackson Bennett is back! I am an unabashed fan of most of his writing, and was massively impressed when I first read The Tainted Cup, about a year ago. It was delightfully weird and just a little bit creepy; a Holmes and Watson style investigation in a Roman-style setting, topped off with some mycology-based body horror.
In The Tainted Cup, the greatest threat the Empire of Khanum faced was not just the murders, but the Leviathans—kaiju-like creatures that emerge from the sea to wreak havoc on the outer cantons. In A Drop of Corruption, the canton of Yellowdale is mostly free of the Leviathan threat. Or at least directly free—no living demi-godzillas breach the shores here. But Yellowdale is home to the one place in the empire where the the corpses of the dead Leviathans are studied and processed in order to facilitate the advancement of the Empire’s alchemical enhancements. It’s also a region under occupation. The Empire has been trying to bring these cantons into the fold for over a century, and the local Kings of Yarrow clearly resent being under its thumb. Unsurprisingly, the sensitive and secretive nature of processing dead Leviathans in service of the Empire has done nothing to vent the pressure.
This is where our Holmes and Watson, Din and Ana, make a re-appearance. A Treasury officer has vanished, and it’s up to Ana and Din to work out how. But it quickly becomes apparent that this was less of an abduction and more of a murder—and the murderer is insanely hypercompetent, to the point that even Ana sometimes finds herself a step behind.
As anyone who has read The Divine Cities Trilogy would know, Bennett is no slouch when it comes to world building, and is well experienced when it comes to writing about politics and power. Both of these come heavily into play here, both on a narrative level and on a more meta-level. It should come as no surprise that the occupation of Yarrowdale by the Empire of Khanum absolutely comes into play during the course of the murder investigation—how could it not? But beyond that, Bennett devotes considerable attention to critiquing kingdoms, empires, and autocratic power more broadly. Though Ana and Din both serve the empire, they are not well served by it in return. Like many under colonial occupation, the people of Yarrow long for freedom—but the kings of old were hardly benevolent, lacking the noblesse oblige often associated with the Arthurian figures beloved in fantasy. And the people of the Shroud? That enigmatic facility where Leviathan remains are processed? It represents yet another, even more unsettling layer of control.
Another thing the great world building facilitates is the mystery beats or tropes of a detective story. Ana, we have to remember, under all of her eccentricities, is a genius investigator. Din himself is alchemically-augmented. One of the risks of trying to write genius detective-style characters is that you run the risk pf making them too clever, their deductions a little too reliant on arse-pull. The fantasy setting of A Drop of Corruption acts a buffer for all this—if Ana’s deductions seem a little far out there, we can assume she knows something about the setting that we do not. Now, I’m not saying that this is being used as a crutch—far from it—but it does buff the edges off things very nicely.
Finally, regarding Ana and Din: while I think that the Shadow of the Leviathan books can be read as stand alones, there is some solid character building occurring across the two novels. Din still has some strong reservations about the system that hew works under, which are are elaborated on further here. And Ana? There’s something going on in her past that is only hinted at here that looks like it will lead to something… interesting (and potentially horrifying) in subsequent installments.
Just like the first book, though, I had a lot of trouble putting A Drop of Corruption down. I really hope that Bennett has further installments in store for us, because outside of solving the murder, there is so much more going on that I want to see explored.