I’m very happy with Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Trade of Blood: An Ana and Din Mystery (Shadow of the Leviathan: Book 3). I’ve had some complaints lately about late-series books that are merely “the further adventures of” their protagonists without advancing their characters or advancing their worldbuilding to any significant degree, but that’s not the situation here. I mean, yes, it’s another episodic book, with Ana and Din solving another murder mystery; however, Bennett also reveals more about how their alchemical-steampunky Empire works (specifically agriculture and animal husbandry, but it’s more interesting and disturbing than expected), and explores more of Din’s alienated family history (more complicated than even he had known)! Additionally, Din himself is undergoing some changes. Also, the case itself is quite intriguing, in some horrifying ways. This is a thoroughly satisfying sequel, which picks up a few plot and character threads from previous books and continues to weave an ever-richer tapestry.
I advise against trying to dive into this novel mid-series, cold. You probably don’t need to reread the first and second books if you don’t have time (although you can lightly refresh your memories without sniffing a scent-phial by reading my previous reviews of The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption), but you do need to be familiar with the characters and the general setup.
Din (Dinios Kol, the first-person past-tense narrator), is an investigator for the Empire, using his alchemically enhanced memory to be the eyes and ears of his senior partner, Ana (Anagosa Dolabra, who usually wears a blindfold to limit overstimulation). This time, it looks like an open-and-shut case where a young man murdered a woman he was spending the night with, but they’re from the two major feuding families of that district. This happens to be the biggest agricultural canton in the Empire, and it can’t afford for its breadbasket to explode into civil war, so our Imperial investigators are sent to help the local authorities to defuse tensions. Naturally, after Ana and Din start investigating, they find out that things are not so simple.
My previous reviews explained that Ana and Din are clearly just making the best of the system that they’ve been born into (although Din thinks being a soldier defending against Leviathans would be far more glorious than police work). Bennett is examining questions of Empire through his books, not just blindly adopting it as an easy framework for fantasy. But by showing again in his third book how shaky are the foundations of the mighty empire, he’s obviously deliberately underlining its fragility. Moreover, it’s also shown here, somewhat horrifically, that the Empire keeps modifying not only its citizens, but also its crops and beasts, all in the name of preserving its status quo — ahem, rather, to preserve its citizens from Leviathan invasion. How nasty will things have to get before they’re literally revolting?
The Author’s Note at the end reveals that Bennett has been thinking deeply about current real-world agricultural practices, apparently unsustainable, and how they will need to become ever more unnatural to satisfy the demands of humanity, and that those thoughts have driven a lot of the choices that he made in writing this book. I found that fascinating. I’m eager to find out what topics he’ll dive into when he returns to Ana and Din’s adventures!
MILD SPOILER 1: Since there are mushrooms and similar things on the book’s cover, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to warn that there’s some fungal horror in this book. And yes, plants were involved in the plot in the first book in the series, but quite enough different things are going on here that it’s a whole new story, not a return to that one.
MILD SPOILER 2: I’ve been wondering whether readers would ever get to meet any of Din’s family, whom he hasn’t seen since he signed up for imperial investigator training and modification, sacrificing himself to earn enough money to let them move inland from the cheaper but more hazardous coastal region where Leviathans invade. Well, he finally encounters a relative in this book, and the reunion evokes decidedly mixed feelings on both sides. Din isn’t happy that his assumptions of how things had been going end up undergoing upheaval, but he really should have been communicating more!
MILD SPOILER 3: Din realizes from certain symptoms that he undergoes that he is embarking on the middle stage of his career; alchemically enhanced investigators like him tend to go mad before they get old enough to retire, so this is a sign of doom to come, when he’ll get a bit older. Naturally, this makes him even gloomier than normal. Ana’s encouraging words, as such, don’t help much. Partly because of this, partly because it’s apparently just his nature, Din engages in extracurricular activities, and Ana disapproves.
Eventually, after some more people die, many disturbing facts are unearthed, and the immediate situation is resolved. It’s unclear whether the deeper situation will be reformed or hushed up, but Ana and Din have done their duty for now, in the best way they can to address this messy situation. Ana continues to be nigh insufferable, but impressively intellectual, and Din continues to suffer her and his own problems in entertaining ways.
A Trade of Blood: An Ana and Din Mystery (Shadow of the Leviathan: Book 3), by Robert Jackson Bennett, is being published Aug. 4 by Del Rey. 400 pages. You can preorder here.
Content warnings: Murders, violence, butchery, and gore, fungal horror, body modifications of people and animals, etc., and mental conditioning and control.
Disclaimer: Del Rey sent me an ARC of this without prompting, since I liked the first two books of the series so much; however, there was no bargain for what kind of revie, if any, I would write.
Addendum: Between my writing of this review and its publication, I bought and read “The Lion’s Tusk,” an Ana and Din short story set in the world of the Leviathan series. It’s all in Ana’s voice, telling Din about a cold case to while away a long carriage ride, and while there wasn’t anything fundamentally wrong with it, it left me pretty cold. I must just like Din’s voice a lot more.
