A Trade Of Blood - Robert Jackson Bennett
A Trade of Blood is the third book in Robert Jackson Bennett's Ana and Din series, and I think it's my favourite one yet, which is saying something because I loved both The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption. I'm going to try and review this without spoilers, which is going to be difficult, because there's so much this book does well that I want to talk about in detail. It only came out yesterday, though, and it doesn't seem fair to ruin it for anyone who hasn't read it yet. If you have read it and fancy a proper spoilery chat, drop me a message, because I need to talk to someone about this.
The premise is simple on the surface. Ana and Din are called out to investigate a murder in a farming community ruled over by two ancestral families, one that raises crops and one that raises livestock. The son of one family has killed the daughter of the other. It's Romeo and Juliet by way of Yojimbo, and it's a brilliant springboard for everything that follows.
Bennett is an author who understands that fantasy is inherently political, and he uses that starting point to dig into the impact of agriculture on the land, on society, and on the people forced to work within systems built to produce our food. He wrestles with the morality of animal agriculture, and with the reality of slavery within agriculture, and he's not remotely coy about any of it. Something he does really well across this series is close each book with an author's note that drills into exactly what he was exploring, so there's never any doubt that the politics are intentional. I really love that about him. He's unapologetic about it.
There's a lot that works here, and it's hard to talk about specifics without spoiling things, but I'll do my best. One decision that pays off enormously is giving Din a partner for this investigation, someone he already has history with. It sounds like a small thing, but it fixes what I think was the biggest weakness of A Drop of Corruption for me, which was that Din so often felt alone in the world. Ana spends so much of her time cooped up working things out on her own that we rarely got to see Din out among people, and so we lost access to his read on the world and how he actually behaves in it. A Trade of Blood gives him a proper buddy-cop dynamic instead, and it lifts the whole book. We finally get to see a side of his personality that hasn't really had room to breathe before, and the result is a much more fully realised character.
The mystery itself is also the best-constructed of the three. There are twists and turns and surprises throughout, but it never feels like Bennett is hiding the ball. It's a fair mystery, one where you can make your own hypotheses along the way and actually feel like you're playing the same game the characters are. I love a crime novel that treats its reader like that, and Bennett does it better here than in either of the previous two books, presumably because he's now got two books' worth of practice at it.
And then there's just everything else. The world-building remains fascinating, particularly the strange, not-quite-magical biopunk fungal-grafting technology that underpins how this society actually functions. It's such a well-realised setting, full of characters who feel genuinely lived-in within it. The prose is a joy, too. I picked this up yesterday and finished it this morning, which tells you everything about how hard it is to put down.
Cannot recommend this series highly enough. Please, if you've read it, talk to me about it.