Starred review from November 1, 2023
It's Dinios Kol's first murder case as the junior assistant to the brilliant, irascible, and much senior investigator Ana Dolabra. Din has been magically engineered to retain every single detail of everything he sees and hears, which should be a boon in his work. But not when the victim is dead as the result of a tree growing out of his lungs. Ana uses Din's observations to determine not just whodunnit but how this uniquely gruesome murder was accomplished. Her investigation, however, discomfits the rich and powerful even as the monstrous climate impedes the search and destroys the evidence. Bennett's (Locklands) series opener introduces readers to a conspiracy of murder and skullduggery as seen through the eyes of a naive junior investigator who is forced to grow up fast and hard as his boss and mentor, the rather Sherlockian Ana, threads her way through a complex conspiracy of murders. VERDICT Highly recommended for lovers of fantasy and steampunk mystery and readers searching for magically engineered combinations of alchemy and corruption in the same vein as Age of Ash by Daniel Abraham and In the Shadow of Lightning by Brian McClellan.--Marlene Harris
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Starred review from November 20, 2023
Bennett (the Founders trilogy) brilliantly melds genres in this exceptional mystery-fantasy, the first in his Shadow of the Leviathan series. Dinios Kol has been tapped to serve as the new assistant to Ana Dolabra, an eccentric investigator with a reputation for solving cases blindfolded and without leaving her home. Dolabra’s recently been reassigned from the Khanum Empire’s richest enclaves to a dull backwater, where she and Kol get a knotty problem to untangle. Kol, whose prior experience consists of investigating pay fraud in the Khanum military, is dispatched to the scene of an unnatural death at the estate of the Haza clan, one of the wealthiest in the land, who mysteriously maintain a house out in the sticks. Commander Taqtasa Blas was found in a guest bedroom with some leafy trees sprouting through his body. Blas, a friend of the Hazas, had a reputation for harassing the estate’s female staff. Kol uses magic fluid to “engrave” the crime scene, impressing every detail on his mind to relate to his superior. Dolabra is intrigued by the apparently supernatural killing and sets about using her superior deductive skills to identify the killer. The worldbuilding is immediately involving, Bennett’s take on a classic detective duo dynamic feels fresh and exciting, and the mystery itself twists and turns delightfully. Readers will be wowed. Agent: Cameron McClure, Donald Maass Literary.
Starred review from December 1, 2023
The wet season is always a dangerous time for the Empire of Khanum. A hideous murder has occurred in the home of a wealthy family in a far-flung canton near the coast. The victim was a commander of the Imperial Engineers, responsible for maintaining the sea wall that protects the nation from deadly Leviathan incursions. Apprentice assistant investigator Dinios Kol is sent by his eccentric master, Anagosa Dolabra, to record the scene of the crime using his abilities as an engraver. An engraver is a Sublime, cerebrally suffused with the enhanced ability to recall everything his senses take in. Then, without even leaving her residence, the annoyingly brilliant Ana identifies the weapon and an accomplice, although the actual killer eludes capture. When a high-ranking officer from the next district arrives, Din and Ana learn there is more to the crime than a single fatality. Ten other engineers have died in the same gruesome manner, deaths that resulted in a catastrophe threatening the lives of everyone on the outer rim. Inspired by Nero Wolfe with a bit of Hannibal Lector added to his prime investigator, Bennett (Foundryside, 2018) kicks off the Shadow of the Leviathan series, which will delight fans of fantasy-infused mysteries.
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February 1, 2024
Sherlock Holmes meets Game of Thrones. Call Bennett's latest a drawing-room mystery, albeit the drawing room is the size of a small otherworldly kingdom. It begins, natch, with a corpse. "You were informed that the nature of his death was an alteration, yes, sir?" So asks a military officer of young Signum Dinios Kol, a.k.a. Din, who's noted that a tree has torn the unfortunate victim apart. Din works for an oddball private detective, Immunis Anagosa Dolabra, a.k.a. Ana, who combines the wiles of Irene Adler with the eccentricities of Sherlock Holmes, including his penchant for narcotics. Din suspects that members of the Haza clan, corrupt 1 percenters, are mixed up in the nastiness, for they're in the way of acquiring some real estate in the area, and the victim was an impediment. The whole business is complicated by the fact that someone has been undermining the walls of the empire so that leviathans can slither in from the ocean and add their mischief to the evil doings of errant titans abroad in the land. Ana has a fierce temper and is more loquacious than the subdued but sometimes lethal Din: "I do so admire," she tells him, "how you can be a flippant shit with a mere handful of syllables. Quite a talent." Bennett borrows from his own Foundryside series for a detail: Where those books involved a strange art called "scriving," here Din is an Imperial engraver, "altered to remember everything I experienced, always and forever," handy when it comes to memorizing safe combinations and the exact wording of past conversations. With plenty of red herrings--beg pardon, red leviathans--and neatly imagined plot twists to work through, the reader fond of faux medieval neologisms and occasional grownup moments ("a glimpse of her body, and a winking tuft of pubic thatch") will enjoy solving the mystery with our heroes. A rousing adventure for alt-fantasy fans.
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