Table of Contents
Preamble
I don’t quite remember from where I first heard about The Tainted Cup from but it has been in my to-be-read pile for a while now. Most recently I heard one of my most favourite booktubers lexi aka newlynova mention it in a video about picking what books to read this summer by…bowling. Great idea to be honest.
Recently I have been on a bit of a murder mystery thing; I have watched several shows along those lines on Netflix – Dept. Q, The Residence and this past weekend I watched Glass Onion. As a teenager I used to be obsessed with the Sherlock Holmes stories and watching these reminded me just how much I enjoyed a good mystery story.
So when I saw lexi mention this book I remembered that it was a genre combination of mystery and fantasy (mystasy?), perfect for this mystery groove I am in. I have never read anything by this author so I didn’t know what to expect other than what was in the book’s description. I think this is also the first time I have read a book that combines mystery and fantasy.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
This book reminded me of a book earlier this year, These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs. Specifically this bit from my review
The first thing I noticed as started reading this book is that it is very technically competent. By that I mean – the world is structured and explained in a natural way, characters, their motivations and ideologies are presented naturally and the amount of worldbuilding is just right.
Review: These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs
The Tainted Cup is also a book that is very technically competent. There is a reasonable amount of world building, the characters are intriguing, and the mystery narrative is well paced.
Worldbuilding
The Tainted Cup is set in a fantasy world with a empire inspired by the Ancient Roman empire and also a bit of the Ottoman empire. It uses terms like “legionnaires” to refer to solders and various Latin words are used to describe ranks and titles, for example – iudex which Wikitionary says means “judge”.
The Ottoman bits seem to come from the use of the term “Iyalet” which appears to be borrowed from the term “Eyalet” referring to administrative divisions within the Ottoman empire. The book doesn’t use it in the same way the Ottomans did, in the book it refers to various divisions of the government – army, judiciary, engineering.
I found that the most interesting aspect of this book’s world was the use of biological modifications to enhance/alter the human characters in this book. Use of so-called “grafts” to provide temporary modifications and “suffusions” to provide permanent modifications. This leads to various archetypes – engravers who are enhanced to perfect recall, cracklers who are strongmen, axioms who are enhanced to be very good at math and apoths enhanced to have a strong sense of smell and the ability to manage contagion.
The worldbuilding here serves to add more layers of complexity to the mystery and I found it to be generally good at that purpose. However, I was not particularly enamored with the fantasy world that was built here. Nothing about it is bad per se, it just didn’t grab me.
Characters
The description of the book on Storygraph says that the book features an “[..] Holmes-and-Watson style pairing” and I think that is a generally accurate description of the dynamic of the two main characters in The Tainted Cup. The primary investigator, or the Holmes is Ana Dolabra, an eccentric who prefers the company of books and her assistant, the engraver Dinios Kol who is often flustered and bewildered by Ana’s whims and actions.
I found that this dynamic while having many of the characteristics of the Holmes-Watson dynamic still leaves me wanting for a bit more character depth. I think the interactions between Dolabra and Kol don’t get actually interesting until the very end of the book. This book is part of a series and the sequel is already out so perhaps there is more depth to the Dolabra-Kol relationship in the second book but in this first book I found it a just a tad bit lacking.
A mystery is also built out of many other characters and this one is no different. Generally, I found all the various characters here serve the purpose of building the mystery and not much else. There wasn’t any side character that particularly caught my eye here.
Narrative
The core of The Tainted Cup is of course the murder mystery narrative which is what I am primarily here for. This is the best part of the book. The author does a good job of slowly building the mystery up from just a single murder to a grander conspiracy involving many players. This is less of “whodunnit” and more of “howdunnit” and the how was more intriguing than the who and why.
This is because the book combines the various magical fantasy elements of the world and weaves them into how the murder(s) happen in a way that’s unique and which left me with a general sense of wonder that kept me invested in the mystery. The pacing of the narrative is just right and I found myself wanting to keep reading to find out what the next big development would be all the way to the end.
Conclusions
I have no strong complaints about any particular aspect of The Tainted Cup or anything that I really disliked. I liked reading this book but I wasn’t enamored with it. I think as a combination of mystery and fantasy its well done and both genres are served well by the book. I put the sequel in my to-be-read pile for whenever next I am feeling in the mood for this kind of story.
I continue to be in the mood for more mysteries, feel free to give me suggestions on your favourites in the replies of the fediverse post this will be shared on. I am thinking of reading some Agatha Christie next as I haven’t read any of her work. What would be a good starting point to her work?
That’s all from me. See y’all next time.
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