Many people refer to the second book in a series as the sophomore slump. Bridge books tend to be extremely hard to write, as authors tend to know the start and the end of their stories but not how to connect the two. As such, it constantly impresses me that Robert Jackson Bennett’s middle novels are often his best ones. A Drop of Corruption, the second book in the Shadow of the Leviathan trilogy, continues this trend by being a strong contender for one of the best books of the year (yes, I know it’s March). Having laid the groundwork for his world in A Tainted Cup, Bennett manages to tell a very captivating locked room mystery, rope me into the greater trilogy narrative, and speak to our current mounting political crisis in America simultaneously.
In the canton of Yarrowdale, a swamp-infested nightmare of a region, an impossible crime has occurred. A Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—abducted from his quarters while the door and windows remained locked from the inside, in a building whose entrances and exits are all under constant guard. As Yarrowdale technically sits outside the empire, any outside assistance and policing must be handled with a delicate hand. Yarrowdale is home to the Shroud, an enormous weeping wound on the world that allows alchemists to process Leviathan corpses and build the thing that makes the Empire run: grafts. It is critical that any criminal elements in this unstable canton not affect the flow of commerce, but the Empire can’t march an army into foreign lands. To solve the case, the Empire calls on its most brilliant and mercurial investigator, the great Ana Dolabra. At her side, as always, is her bemused assistant, Dinios Kol.
A Drop of Corruption is an immediate Bennett classic with all of his signature elements that I love more than anything. It has a compelling mystery that had me rereading every paragraph for clues, fucked up prose that somehow is beautiful one second and horrific the next, an engrossing setting with a gigantic eldrich horror on the horizon, characters you can’t help but fall in love with, and social commentary that feels incredibly timely. I loved A Tainted Cup, but the book felt like it spent a little too much time establishing the foundation for the trilogy and not enough time on its own mystery. A Drop of Corruption, on the other hand, has a mystery that grabs you the second you open the book and doesn’t let you go until the last page. I was much happier with the division of page space in this second entry, and the pacing as a whole might have been the best I have seen from Bennett ever.
Honestly, if you are a fan of the site, I almost certainly don’t need to sell you a Bennett novel. You know we love them, and you likely love them. the review could probably just have been an announcement that it’s out on April 1st, 10/10 stars, go read it. While I don’t really want to go into too many details about the story or the characters to preserve spoilers (though both continue to be great), there is one element of the themes I think would be good to talk about. In A Drop of Corruption, one of the central issues that Dinios is dealing with is a sense of purpose and direction. He is adrift in a capitalistic hellscape run by corrupt elites with all of the power and has witnessed time and again that his efforts aren’t doing much to change the direction of things and make them better. He is exhausted in many different ways and constantly questioning if there is anything in his life he has agency over anymore. This is why it is wonderful that one of the core ideals of this second novel is about how a little person doing what is right will always make a difference. Bennett shows that while one person may not be able to seize control of the world and fix everything, we can still be additive and make things better in our own small ways–and that these ways add up. Sometimes, we are forced to be in a place of reaction, watching power-hungry idiots break things out of an all-consuming sense of greed. It is demoralizing that we can’t stop in and just stop “crimes” from happening. But we can stand up and hold people accountable for what they have done, fix what is broken, and build a better world. Change is hard and awful work, and you need a light inside you that burns like a bonfire to stand up to the winds that will try to blow it out. Yet, one step at a time, we can improve things.
A Drop of Corruption is another fabulous creation in Bennett’s tapestry. It builds very successfully upon the intricate foundation established by A Tainted Cup and uses it as a launching point to reach new heights. The prose is haunting, as always, and the mystery feels like a modern classic. Corruption will absolutely be one of the best books of the year.
Rating: A Drop of Corruption – 10/10
-Andrew
An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.
