Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Imperial snoops Ana Dolabra and Dinios Kol are back on the job, digging into a feud on the edge of the realm. One way to get ahead in the bureaucracy of the Imperial Iudex, Ana tells her ever patient sidekick, Din, is to solve the murder of a young girl, “that veryspecific death, which is a mere fraction of all unlawful activity across all the Empire.” They’ve landed just such a case: a young woman who’s been butchered most expertly, complete with “a bundle of dark, gleaming innards [that] had slipped out to pool upon the floor beside her.” The frontier is the turf of two families, the Buravs and Armentas, who dominate the cattle business on one side and the feed business on the other and who are thus intertwined, like it or not. When young Castus Armenta is arrested for murdering the unfortunate young woman, Zansay Burav, he can’t remember anything—though, unfortunately, he’s known to be a master of “the gutting of the cows.” The discovery of a weird fungus complicates the present and adds intrigue to a past that involves not just Din’s familial backstory but also the origins of the Empire itself. Bennett spins an ambitious tale, packing a lot into a book that’s a touch shorter than others in the series, including none-too-subtle hints that maybe eating cows isn’t so good and that the food industry has an interest in developing additives to “condition and control any population of animals,” humans included. As ever, Din is stolid and hardworking, Ana irrepressibly obscene (“Might this tawdry shit have a faint whiff of something fascinating?”). But she’s also smart and philosophically bent, instructing Din on that bloody ground, as they draw closer to the solution, that “what we do to the beasts in the field we may still one day do to our very kin.” Fantasy meets procedural with a side of veganism, and it’s good merry mayhem. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.