A Trade of Blood - Robert Jackson Bennett

As with the previous two Ana and Din mysteries in the Shadow of the Leviathan series, they are called upon in A Taste of Blood to deal with a serious case that threatens the security and stability of the Empire, which as we are starting to realise, has more than giant sea beasts to contend with. Despite being a loyal and skilled Iudex officer of the Empire, Immunis Ana Dolabra is less than pleased with being sent out in charge of what appears on the surface to be nothing more than a tawdry murder investigation of the young daughter of the head of a high gentry family. When they visit the scene of the murder in Lacanthim in the canton of Sapirad in the third ring of the Empire, they find much that is strange in the nature of the killing and in the family history that surrounds it.

The young woman is Zansay, daughter of Buritis Butav, the prime father of the Burav gentryclan, and the accused is a young man called Castus Armenta, the prime son of the equally important Armenta family, seen running from the scene of their not so romantic Romeo and Juliet tryst in a local inn with a bloodied knife in his hands. The two families with a long history of competing agricultural and livestock history between them are threatening to go to war over this, which would be very bad for the Empire. The matter is not so clear cut however (poor choice of words there) as the murder scene - still fresh - feels very wrong to Din, Ana's assistant investigator; there are no signs of struggle from the young victim despite very serious wounds, cuts and disembowelment, making it an even more troubling sight.

The feud is to go on to claim further victims before Ana and Din can make any sense of how or why, much less who, other than the fact that the killer or killers appear to be able to exert powerful control over their victims. The mystery in Lacanthim in this third book in the series is one that opens up the workings of the Khanum Empire a little further. We are familiar with the reagents, the alterations derived from the blood of the leviathans, but we also find out about other properties it confers, here in A Trade of Blood, coming across scientists with a different duty from the Apoths; the Orbiis, most of whose duties are secret, so secret that even they don't fully comprehend what they are dealing with.

Perhaps even more key to the development of the Shadow of the Leviathan series are certain revelations that Ana and Din and the Orbiis come across in their investigation relating to mysterious ancient artifacts in an ancient impenetrable forest in the region. As far as we know, the 300 year old Emperor is the last of the ancient Khanum race that created the Empire, but there are other ancient races, tribes and religions that little is known about and even less about what happened to them. There are also other vague hints just lightly dropped about overseas lands, which people believe uninhabited. I wonder whether that question might not arise again.

Robert Jackson Bennett really has developed a clever way to take a non-traditional approach to the conventional fantasy novel. It's not just that it is a series of murder-mystery investigations, even if those are the starting points, but as Iudex officers of justice, their duty - as Ana reminds Din at one point - is to seek the truth. And the truth is that there are deeper mysteries that lie behind the seemingly common crimes they investigate. Bennett uses these to probe the mysteries of the Empire of Khanum, other ancient races, the leviathans, the reagents made from their blood and where it all ties together. This is incremental fantasy world building in the guise of a murder-mystery adventure, which just makes it all the more compelling.

But not just fantasy world building. There is of course a meaningful correlation between how the Empire of Khanum functions and our own. As the author observes in the afterword notes, the fantasy world allows him a way of considering subjects in a different context that allows us to view them in a fresh and questioning way. And a troubling way. That seems to be a good and necessary thing in out current times. As well as suggesting that there is still much to develop - Ana and Din also keep revealing new facets to their nature and character - it also means that there is plenty of real world material to keep this terrific series going for a while yet.


Reading notes: A Trade of Blood: Book 3 of Shadow of the Leviathan by Robert Jackson Bennett was published on the 4th August 2026 by Hodderscape. I read a review copy in Kindle edition provided by the publisher through NetGalley.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Him - Clare Empson

Image
The thing about voluntary mutism and dissociative amnesia, which is basically being unable or unwilling to speak or unable and unwilling to let thoughts focus, is that it’s usually associated with trauma and shock. Catherine Elliott has been silent for four months despite efforts by her family and doctors to get her to come back to them. One technique is to get the victim to hold on to a single important event or person that will bring everything back together, and for Catherine that important person is Lucian Wilkes. The other thing about voluntary mutism and dissociative amnesia is that you need to be patient, because it’s going to take a while to find out what it is about Lucian that has caused Catherine to fall into this condition. Catherine met Lucian 15 years ago at university. He’s the kind of boy who makes an immediate and unforgettable impression on everyone; intelligent, witty, handsome, rich, artistic, a little bit wild and impulsive. Not like Catherine who lives a sheltered...
Read more

The Protos Experiment - Simon Clark

Image
Despite having limited experience in the field of cinema, Simon Clark's idea for The Protos Experiment seemed a natural for it to be developed as a film script. That ambition has come to fruition with the movie directed by Laurence and Brian Avenet-Bradley premiering at Cannes this year. Although not yet on general release, Clark's own novelisation appears to retain much of that cinematic quality, but also some novelistic originality and ambition. Ironically, for something that has such a strong visual presence, the novel opens with a scene in a room of near complete darkness where, after convincing himself that he is not dead and opening his eyes, a man discovers that he is in some kind of chamber divided by plastic sheets (always a worrying sign) where a number of other people who can't see each other are chained up. John discovers that he himself is chained to a deranged monster of a man who is going to kill them all. It's a bold and compelling way to start the nove...
Read more

The Ganymedan - R.T. Ester

Image
Behind all the unfamiliar science-fiction technological terms associated with its Martian setting and a sense of being thrown into the deep end, what happens at the start of R.T. Ester's  The Ganymedan is clear enough and sets the ball rolling in a thrilling style. The short version is that Verden Dotnet, or V-Dot as he is known, has just assassinated perhaps the most important man in the system, Archer Lenox-Pileser - known to all as LP - but while trying to make his escape on a spacecraft leaving Mars, he has been identified and killed while trying to evade the authorities. The longer version of what actually happened inevitably is a little more complicated. As indeed is the nature of 'death'. For some wealthy individuals - of which LP was definitely one - the technology that LP helped develop means that you can take frequent backups that can be restored to a new body. Indeed he has been assassinated several times already and used this technology before, but this time hi...
Read more