Hugos 2025: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

One of my goals in reading Hugo finalists is to gain more exposure to contemporary writers of great sf&f—otherwise, I am perpetually behind. Robert Jackson Bennett is one of those writers I have been interested in but never gotten around to; his "Divine Cities" sequence sounded interesting when it was a finalist for the Best Series Hugo (a category I do not read for). So I was gratified when his most recent novel, The Tainted Cup, was a finalist for Best Novel this year.

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

Originally published: 2024
Acquired: April 2025
Read: May 2025

This is a speculative detective novel—appropriately enough!—that's clearly inspired by Sherlock Holmes somewhat. We have an autistic coded detective, and their junior partner; the detective, Ana, is so perceptive that, just like Holmes, she can even make better observations than her junior partner of scenes where she is not present. Din, the junior partner, has a magically-enhanced memory, and he goes to the crime scenes while she does not, and he when he recounts the details to her, she puts together the significance of things that (to use Holmes's formulation) Din saw but did not observe. Ana is autistic-coded, but Din also has a learning disability, as he struggles to understand written text.

The novel takes place in a fantastic empire, one beset from without by massive leviathans and from within by crime and corruption. It opens with Ana and Din investigating the murder of an engineer responsible for the massive sea walls that protect the empire from the leviathans, but they soon discover (of course) a vast conspiracy. It's not the kind of mystery that follows the classic W. H. Auden formulation ("a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies") where the reader solves the mystery alongside the detectives, but rather the kind of a procedural thriller where you slowly move through a world, uncovering details that allow the characters to unlock what's going on. 

It's a pleasure to read. The characters are strongly drawn and interesting, and Bennett is strong on tone and atmosphere. Beyond that, Bennett gets that the pleasure of a speculative novel is that (as Jo Walton says, oft-quoted by me) the world itself is a mystery that the reader gets to uncover. This is a rich, immersive world, and much of the pleasure of the book is in that it feels real with what seems to to be minimal effort on Bennett's part. I enjoyed reading this a lot; once I'm done with reading this year's Hugo finalists, I will definitely be picking up the second book, which is already out, and I'm happy to see that a third is already in the works. It feels like the kind of premise that could keep chugging along for a while quite effectively. Both these characters and this world have a lot more mystery for the reader to uncover.