The Tainted Cup

In the Empire of Khanum, the sea walls must hold. Every wet season the leviathans come up out of the deep and throw themselves against the ramparts, and the whole apparatus of the state exists to meet them. So when an imperial officer is found dead in a wealthy house with a tree grown violently out of his body, the death is not merely a murder but a crack in the empire's defences. Dinios Kol is an engraver, chemically altered to retain everything he sees in perfect detail, and he serves as the eyes of Ana Dolabra, an investigator of formidable gifts and thoroughly unmanageable habits who works blindfolded and rarely leaves her rooms. Sent out to gather what Ana will not go and see for herself, Din finds a case that widens with every question: a family of grotesque wealth, a chain of poisonings, and an engineering corps whose secrets may be worth more than the lives protecting them. Bennett grafts the shape of a classic detective partnership onto a world of biological alteration and monstrous siege, and the result is both a properly clued mystery and a portrait of an empire that has made terrible bargains to survive.