The Tainted Cup

Book 1 of the Shadow of the Leviathan duology

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This tale is a complicated murder mystery. The death at the beginning of the book slowly unfolds into several murders and several killers, and finding out who did what is not at all straightforward.

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We follow a brilliant senior investigator and her promising apprentice as they navigate corruption, privilege, the tension that a wet season brings, and plants that have been bred to kill.

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What I enjoyed most about this book is the world that was created to surround the story. It’s a coastal civilization that, every year during the wet season, has to deal with titans rising from the sea breaching their protective wall and bringing catastrophe. Every year it’s a mad panic to fortify the walls, create more elaborate weaponry and streamline systems of evacuation.

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Most interesting is that the blood of these leviathans and the plants that their blood touches have extraordinary properties that the people have learned to extract and exploit.

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And when I emerged from that dark, I was different. My skin was gray, certainly, but I no longer formed normal memories. For a memory is just a sketch a mind makes of one’s experiences, imperfect and interpretive; yet what my mind made, from that moment on, was perfect, absolute, and endless.

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They've learned how to graft and suffuse these enhancements onto certain people in their society to make them extremely good at their jobs.

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Security people are enhanced with strength grafts, for example. People who are investigators are given a reagent that makes them remember everything they see, hear and read. Other people can see in the dark or smell everything within a mile in extreme detail.

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She looked to be about my age, and she was as tall as I was, with a long neck, enormous purple eyes, and thick, silvery, straight hair that fell in a shining sheet. Eyelids dashed with blue and purple, traceries of red paints about her ears. Lashes as thick as a stonetree’s trunk, her snow-white brow encircled by a gray ribbon threaded with pale green. Her pale skin was so unblemished and luminous it almost appeared to shine, cracks of ethereal white peeking through her robes, which covered nearly the whole of her being from the neck down—except her feet, which carefully shuffled forward on tall platform sandals.

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The world the author created for this story has real promise. The way the hierarchy of society is structured is interesting and the characters are well-drawn.

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But all even with all that, I pushed through this just to reach the end. I don’t enjoy murder mysteries and the writing is just okay. That said, if you like murder mysteries, you’ll probably really like this.

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