In a shuttered room in a dying house, an old woman asks her doctor to make the cat dance. He puts a fluted pipe to his lips and plays a note too high for human ears. The little green creature climbs down off her lap, rises onto its back legs, and begins stepping about the floor in stuttering, careful movements, gesturing with its long leathery fingers to music nobody else can hear. Its silver eyes stay wide and fixed the entire time, and the man watching thinks they look terrified.<\/p>\n
That is the whole novel in one scene, and it happens two hundred pages before anybody says so out loud.<\/p>\n
A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett is the third case for Immunis Ana Dolabra, who investigates blindfolded because ordinary life overwhelms her, and Signum Dinios Kol, whose brain has been altered so he forgets nothing and who therefore does the looking. This time they are sent to cattle country, where a gentry girl has been cut open in a rented room and the boy who ran out covered in her blood is already in a cell. Two feuding ranching clans have armies of drovers in the streets waiting for a reason. What should be a formality becomes something else the moment Din sees the room: no struggle, no screaming, and blood patterns saying the victim lay down and waited to die.<\/p>\n
The drokha-cats of the third ring pick crops at night so the labourers wake to full bushels. They do it because they have been fed a neuro-fungus called the guiding web, which makes their brains sensitive to particular pitches, and then trained with a pipe until a note and a task are welded together in their heads. An empire that has altered itself into near-sterility, and so has nobody left to send into the fields, considers this an excellent solution.<\/p>\n
Somebody has worked out how to do it to people.<\/p>\n
This is where A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett is unmatched. The conditioning obeys strict rules laid down early and never fudged: it needs repeated doses in drinking water, it produces nightmares within two days, it can only enforce actions the victim has performed hundreds of times before. A detective story built on a fantastical weapon usually cheats somewhere. This one never does, and the deduction that finally breaks a three-year-old death rests on the fact that hanging is not a repeatable act. The reader is given everything needed, in plain sight, in the correct order.<\/p>\n
The economics are just as rigorous. Enormous cattle need enormous feed, feed needs land, and land is the one thing nobody can manufacture, so the family that controls beef and the family that controls the grain to grow it have spent decades trying to strangle each other. Anyone who has looked at how much of the planet\u2019s surface is given over to farming<\/a>, and how much of that exists purely to feed animals rather than people, will recognise the shape of the argument. Bennett is not subtle about it, and an unusually direct author\u2019s note confirms he does not intend to be.<\/p>\n The real development in A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett is Din. His augmentations have begun to \u201cmature\u201d, meaning the memories he has been storing for three years are starting to speak to him unbidden, offering opinions on crime scenes before he has consciously formed them. Engravers are known to burn out young. He now has proof his clock is running faster than he was promised, and the voice his memories have chosen to use belongs to someone he lost long ago.<\/p>\n Bennett braids this with a family reunion Din has been dodging for six years, in the form of a sibling who turns up inside the investigation with a life he knows nothing about. Their scenes are excellent: no tearful embrace, just resentment about money, silence, and who got to leave. Set beside a gentry clan destroying itself over inheritance and a father whose devotion to his house has hollowed him out, the novel\u2019s real subject emerges, which is what families do to the children they claim to be protecting.<\/p>\n There is also a love affair, between Din and the exhausted, beautiful commander of the local environmental order, and it is written with an unfussed decency: two adults finding brief comfort while the world rots around them. It costs him something, and the book does not spare him that cost.<\/p>\n Read the first two.<\/strong> This is emphatically book three. Newcomers can follow the mystery but will miss what makes the ending land. For all that, this is the weakest-plotted of the three. The list of viable suspects is short, and one of them declares himself early by simple elimination, so a long stretch of the final act is spent waiting for the detectives to reach a conclusion the reader already holds. The middle sags in the same way: a repeating cycle of Din investigating, Din reciting his memories to Ana, another well being tested, another strip of paper turning orange. In the first book that rhythm felt like method. Here it starts to feel like padding.<\/p>\n The coincidence that puts Din\u2019s relative inside the suspect family, in the one canton he happens to be posted to, is enormous and goes unexamined. The romance is compressed into a handful of days and then ended by a revelation that has almost nothing to do with the couple, which makes an otherwise moving thread feel partly like scaffolding. And readers still waiting for a straight answer about what Ana Dolabra actually is will get a few more tantalising inches of rope and a great deal of pained deflection.<\/p>\n What redeems all of it is the final descent. The last stretch of A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett abandons the murder entirely and goes underground, into what the empire\u2019s ancestors built and then walled up, and the image waiting down there reframes every casual mention of livestock in the preceding four hundred pages. It is the best sequence Bennett has written in this series, and it turns a decent mystery into a genuinely disturbing book about labour, appetite and who gets counted as a person. The parallel to real industrial livestock systems<\/a> is not accidental.<\/p>\n The Tainted Cup<\/a> and A Drop of Corruption<\/a> by Robert Jackson Bennett. Books one and two, and both are essential before this one. Ana gets her answer, as she always does, and the arrest solves almost nothing: the industry grinds on, the appetite that created the weapon is undiminished, and the two detectives ride away knowing exactly how little they have changed. A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett is a flawed entry in a very good series and simultaneously its most ambitious book, and the last thirty pages will follow anyone who reads them out of the wood and into the supermarket aisle.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a shuttered room in a dying house, an old woman asks her doctor to make the cat dance. He puts a fluted pipe to his lips and plays a note too high for human ears. The little green creature climbs down off her lap, rises onto its back legs, and begins stepping about the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7037"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Three Books In, and the Watson Is Falling Apart<\/h2>\n
Before Starting<\/h3>\n
\nContent.<\/strong> Sustained on-page gore, autopsy and exhumation, industrial animal slaughter, suicide and self-harm, and body horror involving fungal growth through the skull.
\nThe horror is consent.<\/strong> The genuinely upsetting material is not violence but compulsion: people made to perform their own deaths, and made to feel bliss while doing it.<\/p>\nWhere the Seams Show<\/h2>\n
If You Finish This and Need Something Else<\/h3>\n
\nMexican Gothic<\/a> by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. For fungus as an instrument of control over a household.
\nAnnihilation<\/a> by Jeff VanderMeer. For biology that behaves like an intelligence with plans of its own.
\nPiranesi<\/a> by Susanna Clarke. For the awe and dread of walking through what a vanished civilisation left standing.<\/p>\nWhere It Leaves You<\/h2>\n