A Trade of Blood

Maybe nothing will ever stand up to the multiple mysteries we got in the Tainted Cup, but I enjoyed the layered murder mystery here all the same. This series continues to be a perfect trickle of character development, weird biological fantasy, slow worldbuilding reveals, and a grippy mystery that makes me devour them.

It's always a question of expectations, but I was caught off guard by the second book in this series when I read it originally. Knowing that Bennett had previously written two trilogies, I had expected an escalation of reveals to meet the pacing that a trilogy would require. It made the second book fall flat at the time. Since then, it was made clear that this is something Bennett is happy to write a much longer series about, and it's become much easier to enjoy the story being told and have patience that backstory will be revealed in time.

I like how much this book digs into Din's family history. There's a little bit of mention of his father's debts in book two, but those mostly are just things holding back him back from fleeing to join the legion. Here, we find out a bit more, and that part of the reason we haven't heard about Din's family much earlier is a deliberate avoidance on his part. More in the future on this front, clearly.

Minorly, I also like that this series is willing to skip time forward, and assume that there are some minor cases that the reader doesn't need to hear about directly. This book is three years into Ana and Din working together, and it's fun to be able to see Din coming into his own even more than in the previous books.

As the title implies, the meat of this book is about the unnaturalness of the beef industry in the Empire, while also directly reflecting the same unnaturalness in our own world. In some ways, this metaphor almost didn't stretch far enough, but only because our own world already takes this to such extremes already.

I think it goes beyond being merely a criticism of farming practices. Because "tradition is hard to jettison" and the Empire will not change its hungers, it means that cattle, drokha-cats, and humans all have to be modified in its stead to keep the status quo. Ultimately, Din worries that, like the urhosi cattle, he too has been permanently altered in order to become a better sacrifice for the Empire. This line of thought also resonates directly with what's going on with [redacted].

Another wonderful instalment in the author's series of mysteries involving Ana (the superb analyst) and Din (the observer who never forgets a detail). Sent out to quickly investigate a murder that involves the son and daughter of two rival families that provide most of the meat and feed the Empire depends upon to work, they quickly realise that all is not as it seems.

Ana deduces that the murder has been preplanned by another, and driven by an organism that infected both the murdered and murderer. Tracking down the real suspect is no easy task as the body count mounts. And the infection has been spread to many others, leading Ana and Din to re-examine old bodies to discover the extent of the murder plot against the families.

During the investigation, more details on how the Empire works and the history of the races that gave rise to the Empire is revealed. And it is not a pretty picture: to feed the desire of people to eat meat, cows made huge by the blood of the Titans are reared. These cows require lots of feed, giving rise to the two rival families (one breeds the cows, the other provides the feed) and the enslavement of a cat-like species to collect the feed (there are not enough people for that task).

But as the investigation would reveal, this enslavement is not limited to humans. To the races that created the Empire, other humans are just like the cat-like slaves. In the end, Ana and Din may have solved the mystery, found the real killer and saved the Empire from a family feud: but is it an Empire worthy to be saved? It is possible the author may address this in a future book.