I throughly enjoyed reading every page of The Tainted Cup. The world Bennett portrays is fascinating and vital. He creates a unique environment without needing pages of info dumps. The mystery is involving even if the villain is fairly obvious, the method is not.
I hope that , as is hinted at the end, there will be a sequel . The central characters are people I would like to know better and with whom I would like to spend more time. The political structure was hinted at but I would like it fleshed out in further volumes.

Thank you to the publisher for an early ARC for an honest review.The story of Din (Watson) and his boss Ana (Holmes) is slow, though well fleshed out. I can foresee that a lot of people will like the comparisons of True Detective I received from this one, but not my jam. The characters just didn’t grab me early on unlike Foundryside. I also thought the climax had a lot more energy than the first third of the book, it would be nice is that was sprinkled in a bit more to liven up the pages a bit.

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett has such an intriguing premise and, for the most part, lives up to what it promises.

Ana and Din really did feel like a duo in the style of Watson and Holmes but with their own eccentricities. The banter between these two and some moments like that lock picking scene were the highlights of the book for me and I enjoyed how much Din learned from Ana and how he surprised her in return. I do think that if you’re looking for this relationship to develop or change over the course of the book, you’ll probably be disappointed.

The book starts with a seemingly small and normal case, if not made prestigious by happening inside the home of an incredibly wealthy family but expands and takes the duo to various places. I like that as you read, you’re given clues through worldbuilding and rewarded for learning about this world, which felt fun and makes the reader more invested. One of my biggest pet peeves is terribly done exposition and I’m happy to say that The Tainted Cup avoids this and expects you to pick up on things as the story progresses. At times, Ana and Din will talk about recent clues, which gives you a refresher.

If you’re looking for a smaller and more intimate murder mystery, this is not it. As Din and Ana continue investigating, the mystery becomes more complex and more players enter the picture. I liked this for the most part since it lent a sense of danger and more pieces to play with but I do think most of these side characters were very shallow and uninteresting. One of the best parts of a mystery is having the suspects impart strong first impressions and then unraveling their secrets and personas as you go, which The Tainted Cup lacks.

The pacing also wasn’t for me, especially during the latter half, and I find it dragged a lot when Ana and Din weren’t together. I don’t find Din that interesting by himself and he really shone when in the same space as Ana. Things felt so slow when the two weren’t playing off one another. The reveal and ending was pretty underwhelming for me and I really wish that the climatic moment had been stronger.

Overall, The Tainted Cup is an interesting mystery set in a fantastical world. It shines when its two lead characters are together and in the worldbuilding, but many of the characters fall flat and ultimately that led to an unsatisfying ending.

Thanks to Random House Publishing Group - Del Rey and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review!

This review has been scheduled to be posted on Goodreads, Amazon, and my blog on January 23, 2024.

I have still never met a Robert Jackson Bennett book I didn't like. This book does so many things so well that it's almost hard to know what to highlight first, but underneath all of that it's just so damn competent. It's paced perfectly, the worldbuilding is all internally consistent, and the dialogue and narration never feels stilted. I know this sounds like damning with faint praise, but I just read a novel by an established author with a bunch of great ideas that failed in those things, and I really appreciate them in their presence. Over and over again, Bennett hits the balance just right.

At it's heart, this is the platonic ideal of a Sherlock Holmes story. Din, our narrator, is the essence of Watson, biologically modified to remember everything he sees and be able to report it perfectly, and he is all action. Ana, his boss and our Holmes figure, is the opposite: all thought, while she sits in a low-stimulation room and compiles information. Din has no sense of humour but is still fun to read and is self-flagellating for a reason that is neither dumb nor unforgiveable; this is a hard balance to strike. It felt to me like good neurodivergent/learning disability representation, too, where the autism coding of one character is presented as neither superpowering nor crippling. All of the characters we meet are keenly observed, with just enough small details to give us a strong sense of who they are.

It's an incredibly readable book, with prose that is descriptive but not overwrought, and dialogue that always feels believable. It's a tricky thing to hit the right balance between interesting terminology and intelligibility, but Bennett does it well. The book is no first-person-snark, but it is still funny, and it's lovely to spend time with these characters. Like Bennett's last trilogy, it's just casually queer without feeling like it's trying too hard to be. The pacing is pitched just right, with consistent onwards momentum but room to breathe. There's a good balance between mysteries I could and could not figure out in advance, and of course it all made sense in hindsight. The worldbuilding is unique and fascinating, with some interesting things to say about environmental interactions with capitalism.

With Bennett's last two trilogies, I've felt that they can have the tendency to get too high stakes by their end, with world-ending magic that makes it hard to identify with the characters at their heart. I can totally see how this could go that way - there's plenty of hints that have been dropped about some of the mysteries of the world - but I'm really looking forwards to reading what comes next. Every one of Bennett's trilogies has been better than the last, and it's just such a joy to read.