A Drop of Corruption
Review
A Drop of Corruption, by , is the second Shadow of the Leviathan book. This time, Din and Ana track down a murderer in the northern Kingdom of Yarrow whose brilliance is almost a match for Ana’s own.
In A Drop of Corruption, Din and Ana travel to Yarrow to solve the murder of a treasury officer. At first, it looks like the officer was abducted from his heavily guarded and locked room, but Din and Ana quickly figure out that the man everyone thought was the official was actually the murderer in disguise. They realize he’s been planning to sabotage the negotiations between the Empire and Yarrow.
I really enjoyed the mystery and the introduction of a villain who could challenge Ana’s mind.1 The slow reveal of the murderer’s plot—from a single killing, to theft, to terrorism meant to destabilize negotiations between Yarrow and the Empire—kept me frantically turning pages to see what came next. The fertilizer bomb was an eerie nod to real-world domestic terrorism. The Shroud—a special containment structure used to butcher leviathans—and the augurs who bore through the corpses using their pattern-recognizing brains were fantastic additions to the world.
But I was disappointed by the setting. made Yarrow feel much closer to high fantasy as a critique of the genre’s obsession with autocratic rulers. That shift made it lose some of the biopunk weirdness that made The Tainted Cup so engaging. The book referenced events from the first one, but without enough context for me to recall them clearly. It’s tough to balance reminding the reader without over-explaining the last book, but it left me wondering if the author was changing the story or if I’d just forgotten the details.
The major theme of The Tainted Cup was that a state is made up of its people, and each has a responsibility to put in the work to maintain it. A Drop of Corruption continues that theme but also adds a focus on the danger of authoritarian rulers. The King of Yarrow is a slaver whose failures lead to the destruction of his kingdom and people; the murderer—the pale king—isn’t driven by high-minded ideals but by ordinary greed; and Thelenai, the ranking imperial in the area, lets her pride push her into reckless decisions that end up creating the murderer in the first place.
In my review of The Tainted Cup, I said it was a “Holmesian detective story,” which isn’t quite right: has clarified that he was inspired by ’s Nero Wolfe series. I haven’t read that series, but it seems like a better fit.2 Both Nero and Ana are armchair detectives whose memory-enhanced partners do all the investigating. Clearly, Ana isn’t modeled on Holmes, who traipsed about all over England and Europe doing much of the legwork himself.3
I was reminded of a few previous reads:
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The court intrigue and dying monarch are similar to ’s A Memory Called Empire.
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Ana eating her grim feast to gain knowledge parallels Severian consuming Thecla’s flesh to gain her memories in ’s The Claw of the Conciliator.
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The three augurs are like the witches in ’s Macbeth, who themselves draw from the three Fates.
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The triumvirate of augurs forming a single mind and being unable to communicate with normal humans is like the Bicamerals in ’s Echopraxia.
Although not as good as The Tainted Cup, I still had fun reading A Drop of Corruption. I’m looking forward to the third book.
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Although not quite her Moriarty—Holmes’s archenemy from ’s The Final Problem—as the murderer dies at the end of the book. ↩
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I’m a fan of mystery—I loved the Sherlock Holmes series as a teen—so I might give the first Nero Wolfe series book, Fer-de-Lance, a try sometime soon. ↩
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Sherlock’s older brother, Mycroft, is an armchair detective. ↩