Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Are all fictional detectives neurodivergent?

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

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4.5 stars Dark Corner selection: April 2026 Nowhere Book Bingo 26: Award Winner (Hugo and World Fantasy Award 2025) CBR18 Bingo: Map (there’s a map at the start, showing the various walls to keep out the Levianthans) Official plot synopsis (since I’m reviewing a book I finished in APRIL): <i>In Daretana’s most opulent mansion, a high Imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree spontaneously erupted from his body. Even in this canton at the borders of the Empire, where contagions abound and […]

Let’s Meet the Meat Industry

A Trade in Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett

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It’s another Shadow of the Leviathan book! And this means there’s a new mystery for Ana and Din to solve. Like the previous two books, The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption, A Trade in Blood takes us to a new canton in Khanum and with that comes a new murder and a new aspect of Empire for Robert Jackson Bennett to pick apart. This time, it’s meat. Or to be more specific, how does an Empire with an increasingly expensive tastes and a […]

Corruption and Colonization (And Kaiju)

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

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Yes, Robert Jackson Bennett is back! I am an unabashed fan of most of his writing, and was massively impressed when I first read The Tainted Cup, about a year ago. It was delightfully weird and just a little bit creepy; a Holmes and Watson style investigation in a Roman-style setting, topped off with some mycology-based body horror. In The Tainted Cup, the greatest threat the Empire of Khanum faced was not just the murders, but the Leviathans—kaiju-like creatures that emerge from the sea to wreak […]

Murder, Mystery and Mycology

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

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Wow. Not only is today a public holiday, but we’re also facing temperatures in Houston that would melt us faster than the Wicked Witch of the West. So of course this makes it an excellent kind of day to try and catch up with my sorely neglected reviews. I love most of Robert Jackson Bennett’s writing, but I had no idea what he was going to get up to after finishing The Founders Trilogy. Or when he was going to release anything after The Founders […]

Kaiju Holmes

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

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A Holmes and Watson style mystery set in a high fantasy world reminiscent of Attack On Titan or Pacific Rim. Dinios Kol is an engraver. An engraver can permanently engrave memories in their mind and retrieve them at any time by inhaling different scents. He is the brand new assistant to Ana Dolabra, a brilliant but extremely eccentric Iudex investigator who is apparently in some sort of great disgrace, banished to a backwater town by the sea walls. In a nearby town a high ranking […]

Smashy Smash

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

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CBR Bingo- Strange Worlds I am glad to see a bunch of folks reading The Kaiju Preservation Society because it was great fun. Very much like his Redshirts novel where a merry band of misfits exist and wackiness ensues. It’s not completely low stakes, and it had enough tension that I almost worried a little for our misfits. These misfits are smart scientists, except for the main character, Jamie. Jamie lifts things. Jamie is pretty non descript. Most of the characters are not described in […]



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