Review of A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett

When a writer hits a groove, it's tough not to hope they can stick it for a while. Robert Jackson Bennett put the needle in with The Tainted Cup, first book in the Shadow of the Leviathan series, then settled in, letting the turntable sing with A Drop of Corruption. Just a year later, the third book in the series, A Trade of Blood (2026), is hitting shelves. Still spinning?

A Trade of Blood drops the unlikely detective duo, Dinius Kol and Ana Dolabra, into the middle of Sapirdad, a frontier agricultural land where two families, the Armentas and the Buravs, are engaged in a clan war. The Armentas raise cattle while the Buravs harvest the crops needed to feed the cattle. They feud despite this symbiosis. Din and Dolabra are called to the scene when the eldest daughter of the Armentas is found disemboweled on a hotel room floor, the scion of the Buravs, her ostensible lover, covered in blood in the forest. What they uncover turns the clans on their heads, leaving the land in tatters.

A Taste of Blood is a dark fantasy Sherlock Holmes mystery in a Romeo & Juliet setting, driven by a Pied Piper plot device on fungal steroids. Oh, and it has livestock of Nostrilia proportions. If that sounds complicated, no worries. Bennett effectively repeats what he did in The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption; he presents the reader a tantalizing scene, and layer by layer peels back the onion of setting to resolve it. It's eccentric aristocrats, sketchy cousins, animal butchery, uncanny forests, cranial fungus, and a splash of Din family drama. It's more of the good stuff—the groove in swing.

With three books now in the race, every reader will have their favorite Leviathan novel. Each is special, but one thing nobody can deny A Trade of Blood is relentless pace. The novel does. not. stop. The opening lines feel rehashed, but every word thereafter pushes and pushes and pushes the reader deeper into the mystery. Not only do the hooks have barbs, the barbs have barbs. The reader won't be able to let go until they know how, who, and why—the stuff of proper mysteries.

I don't really have anything negative to say about A Trade of Blood. Bennett knows exactly what he is doing, and does it well. There is an undercurrent of theme commenting on the destructive nature of industrialized meat production, but it's not necessary to engage with. Your beach or your bedside reading won't want to put it down regardless.

In the end, A Trade of Blood sees Bennett firmly seated in the groove of the Shadow of the Leviathan series. The novel flows naturally from the framework established and delivers a heady brew of the familiar and the new—what readers expect from the known duo of Din and Dolabra in a fresh story that works within yet expands the Leviathan world in rich, engrossing fashion. It's page-turning reading that most readers will have difficulty putting down.