book review

The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey, 2024)

This was the discussion topic at today's Mythopoeic Society book group meeting. We all liked the book and had a juicy discussion. Liking it was particularly unusual for me, because it's a murder mystery and is framed like one. Generally I don't like rule-obeying murder mysteries, but I enjoyed this one and the plot and storytelling had me captivated all the way through, an experience rare for me these days with any novel.

Part of what helped is that. although the book obeys the rules of murder mysteries - in particular there's sufficient clues to answer most of the mysteries if you're clever enough - it doesn't follow the formulas of the genre - save one, a scene in which the detective lays out her deductions in front of all the other relevant characters. There is, for instance, no array of possible suspects. The detective accurately fingers the culprit for the original murder fairly early on. But besides trying to find this person, who has disappeared, what keeps the story going is that there's a lot more to the plot than that. Much of the unveiling at the end is extremely clever; it's only the last couple onion layers of plot that seemed a little stretched and implausible.

The detective, says the author in a note, is a cross between Nero Wolfe and Hannibal Lecter. The Nero Wolfe influence is obvious: she (yes, it's a woman) is reclusive and prefers to stay in her room and ratiocinate; the narrator and principal character is her Archie Goodwin legman; but someone will have to tell me what makes her like Hannibal Lecter besides a taste for eating raw meat.

Besides being a murder mystery, the book is a fantasy? no, a science fiction novel. It takes place in an imaginary fantasy-world-like kingdom with a high technology that's botanically based rather than our metallurgical one. One result of this is that a person who dies when a large plant suddenly erupts from his body, while strange and disturbing even here, turns out to be not as utterly weird a thing as it would be in our world. I found that orienting myself to this world's characteristics made the first chapter rather challenging, but by chapter two the story was off and running. The author has a knack for throwing in twists and other surprises without derailing the story as it's been told; the balls are all kept in the air; the prose is clear and things like Geography and the relationship between characters is always clear.

This is book one of "Shadow of the Leviathan," but it's a complete finished story with no more loose end than a hint as to where the sequels will come from. B. has read the two sequels published so far and says they're just as imaginative and exciting as this one, so I'll probably indulge myself in them also, without a deadline like the meeting to get them done by.