“Great fantasy detective stories are too rare, but Bennett—[a] rising star of fantasy—more than delivers.” —The Washington Post, on The Tainted Cup
In the canton of Sapirdad, two of the Empire’s most powerful families are moments away from going to war with each other, their hundreds of retainers gathered with swords drawn. If blood is spilled, the whole of the empire may be plunged into starvation and chaos.
To deescalate matters, someone must do the impossible: prove that one family’s eldest son is innocent of a gruesome and unforgivable murder, despite the incontrovertible evidence against him.
It is with this undertaking that the great detective Ana Dolabra is tasked, her assistant Din at her side—and the two find themselves racing with great speed and little dignity to the scene.
As ever, the impossible proves little obstacle for the deadly combination of Ana’s intellect and Din’s keen eye, and mere hours after riding into the dusty town, Ana glimpses the greater pattern behind the crime. A deeper, subtler web of death is being woven in plain sight, by a mastermind with an ancient magical technology at his disposal.
But even Ana's uncanny insight is of little use when each new suspect she uncovers ends up dead--with each new killing calculated to bring tensions between the two rival clans past the boiling point. And as Din pursues their adversary through the canton's wild ranges, sprawling ranches, and reeking slaughterhouses, he finds his loyalties divided in unexpected ways.
The series
In a land where monsters rise with the tide and truth is more dangerous than myth, Shadow of the Leviathan carves out a space unlike any other in the fantasy genre—a place where the grotesque is beautiful, the arcane is biological, and the greatest weapon is observation.
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Set in the Empire of Khanum, a society both fortified and fractured by the seasonal emergence of towering leviathans, the series follows Ana Dolabra, a brilliant, blindfolded investigator with an eccentric mind, and her meticulous assistant Dinios Kol, who forgets nothing. Together, they navigate a world reshaped by the alchemical power of leviathan blood—where plants invade flesh, and politics are no less tangled than the roots of a living, weaponized forest.
The narrative blends forensic mystery with dark fantasy, evoking the cerebral allure of a locked-room thriller amidst the chaos of a biologically enchanted empire. As Ana and Din peel back layers of bureaucratic secrecy, mutated ecosystems, and inherited power, the series draws readers into a setting where every detail matters, and every clue is alive with possibility.
While The Tainted Cup, the first installment, has already caught the attention of genre-bending fantasy fans—and earned a Hugo nomination along the way—it’s not the accolades that linger. It’s the atmosphere: dense with tension, rich in imagination, and charged with the quiet terror of knowing that some questions are too dangerous to answer.
Shadowy, smart, and steeped in the uncanny, Shadow of the Leviathan offers an investigation not just into crimes, but into the terrifying machinery of empire, science, and belief. For those drawn to strange ecosystems, flawed heroes, and a touch of the surreal, this is a world you won’t soon escape.
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