This is the third book in the Ana and Din Mysteries/Shadow of the Leviathan series. In "The Tainted Cup," I was like, "I like the worldbuilding, the characters are a little too one-dimensional and over-the-top sometimes." "A Drop of Corruption" improved upon this--the characters didn't seem so over-the-top, but the worldbuilding was still good. This one has maybe gone too far in eroding the characters' unique traits.
Din and Ana travel to a province where cattle is the big industry because everyone likes eating meat. There are two rival aristocratic families in the livestock business who are a big deal locally, even if not the richest or most important on the scale of the entire empire. The daughter from one house is found dead; the son from the other is found covered in her blood. A Romeo and Juliet tragedy? Frame job?
The exciting part of this, for me, was that Din inadvertently runs into one of his sisters, Fotia. Din took the job as an investigator, with the biotech modifications that ensues, as a way to pay off his family debts and provide for them. But he hasn't spoken to them in years, and Fotia is not happy about it when they reunite. The comparison and contrast between the paths they've taken in life, and how it might or might not be construed as sacrifices for monetary advancement, was neat.
RJB has a fun sense of humor, I like stuff like "I got to intimidate people by reminding them that I have a perfect memory and they shouldn't mess with me. They don't stop to think about the fact that my memories are kinda meaningless if they remove my head from my shoulders."
In book one, it was an important part of the plot that Din is dyslexic. By now, however, he's able to read things and translate well even in his second language. Ana's ranting and raving used to get them sideways looks from authority figures they need to work with; now, it's more confined to her complaining about aristocrats to Din, but being ultimately chill with the fact that Fotia is enaged to one. There was a Reddit post about "the vault had four dials with thirty possibilities each, which meant that the total amount of combinations was unable to be brute-forced. Ana mentioned 'yeah, that's 810,000, that's too many' and everybody was impressed that she could do math in her head," except, as the Redditor pointed out, "a lot of us can do 30^4 in our heads, that's not something you do every day but it's also not rocket science?" Intelligence being more an informed attribute than indirectly revealed.
This wouldn't be an issue if I was otherwise invested in the characters and the story, but this one is more of a downer.
"It makes me wonder--is such a people worth maintaining? For a willingness to tolerate suffering for one's comfort only grows over time, in my experience. In facct, the more I read, the more I suspect, Din...perhaps we now echo an older age of the Empire. One that failed--perhaps deservedly."
I studied her, unnerved. Whenever Ana had spoken of protecting the Empire before, she had always listed the many unsatisfying compromises one had to make to keep it all upright--but she had never suggested that it might be better to send it all tumbling down.
Din's response to this attitude a couple chapters later is a Candide-esque "well, we just have to cultivate our garden," but I found it unconvincing.
Bingo: Published in 2026, Murder Mystery
