The Tainted Cup
by Robert Jackson Bennett
☆ Shortlisted for the 2025 Edgar Allan Poe Awards
The Tainted Cup is a murder mystery set in a fantastical, dystopian world, where everyone lives in fear of being crushed by sea creatures currently kept out by a wall.
Recommendations from our site
“It’s a murder mystery – the tense kind, where people keep on dying. It’s got the charm of a classic mystery, and in some ways a very conventional set up – our protagonist Din is a form of detective’s assistant, solid and reliable, while the detective herself is preternaturally brilliant, socially irreverent and thoroughly maddening. But that’s where the familiar territory ends. These are fantastical murders in a fantastical realm, all highly original.” Read more...
“It’s a murder mystery, set in a rich secondary world – beset by leviathans, defended by a sea-wall, building itself from lightweight fern-paper because of the frequent leviathan-quakes, and battling contagion – a terrifying affliction where plants take root within living humans and kill their host. This world features its own complex power structures, within which our protagonist Dinios Kol is apprenticed to something like a detective inspector.” Read more...
“The Tainted Cup belongs to a popular new hybrid genre, fantasy mystery, but is probably more fantasy than mystery” Read more...
The Best Mystery Books of 2025
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“Detective fiction is given a magical twist in Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup. The Edgar-winning author combines intricate world-building with a Sherlockian murder investigation to create a fantastical, richly imagined story, the first in a planned trilogy.” Read more...
Popular Fiction Highlights of Spring 2024
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
