Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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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 to solve—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 […]

CBR BINGO: You—”‘Mm. Two lovers, from two feuding gentryclans, meeting secretly under false names for their tryst!’ She scoffed. ‘How puerile. How derivative. I pray it is more deviant than it appears!'”

A Trade of Blood (Shadow of the Leviathan, #3) by Robert Jackson Bennett

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Robert Jackson Bennett is on a mission to document the entirety of his own made-up world by creating unsettling, weird, fantastical murders that letting him explore it, and I am here for it. This time we’re exploring the complicated and fraught world of agriculture and how it intersects with capitalism, Romeo and Juliet-style. Also, FUNGUUSSSSS. ALSO! I had assumed that this would only be a trilogy, because his other three series are trilogies, but THERE WILL BE MORE! Maybe a lot more! (More than five, […]

“People don’t often get murdered in banks. They’re usually rather difficult to escape from.”

A Drop of Corruption: An Ana and Din Mystery by Robert Jackson Bennett

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Continuing in the vein of the previous book, Ana Dolabra, the Empire’s most brilliant and mercurial detective, and her bemused assistant Dinios Kol, must solve a locked door mystery. This time it’s in the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire’s reach. However, what Ana and Din first believe to be an abduction turns out to be a murder, one with no discernible method or motive. Until they realize that this crime may be geared towards bringing down the Shroud, where the […]

Politically topical and relevant but did it stray from what the first novel set up?

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

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I feel like I am the odd one out because I didn’t like this one as much as the previous one. Not sure if I had certain expectations for this novel and the fact that Bennett took a different approach colored my reaction or if it was something else entirely. It’s also why it’s taken me 2 months to even want to try to tackle this review. I wonder how much this is the novel he had originally intended to write when he started his […]

Nero Wolfe but make it Japanese

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

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When a book’s premise is basically “freaky murders happen in a Japan-like country dealing with a Kaiju problem, and the murders need to be solved by an uber-intelligent shut-in and her magically altered assistant”, you’re going to pique my interest. And this book delivered its premise in all the best ways. In the world of Daretana, there are walls built to keep the Kaiju from invading, where there blood can work strange magical changes and contagions are rampant. In one of the elite mansions, a […]



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