The Tainted Cup

Commander Taqtasa Blas, an imperial engineer, is found dead in a guest bedroom at a country house of the wealthy Haza clan, with leafy trees sprouting through his body. Dinios Kol, a junior investigator whose body has been altered so that he remembers everything he sees perfectly, is sent to look at the body and report every detail back to his superior, who will not leave the house.

That superior is Ana Dolabra, who wears a blindfold indoors because the world is too loud for her, eats constantly, insults everyone, and is known for solving cases without leaving her home. The arrangement is Holmes and Watson rebuilt so that the assistant is a recording instrument and the detective seldom attends the scene.

The setting is the reason to read it. The empire runs on engineered biology rather than machinery: people are altered for strength, speed and a range of mental gifts, plants and animals are routinely augmented too, and every wet season enormous creatures called leviathans come out of the sea and hit the sea walls, which is the only thing the whole state exists to survive. The deaths turn out to reach the engineers who keep those walls standing.

Din is the reason it has heart. He is provincial, poor, deeply unsure of himself, and quietly hiding a severe dyslexia and the fact that he cheated on the exams that got him the job, so every scene in which he performs perfect recall for his superior carries a private risk.

It is a proper fair play mystery, with clues laid out for the reader and a solution that does not cheat, wrapped in worldbuilding dense enough to reward slow reading, and it is very funny about bureaucracy and about the indignity of working for a genius.

Around four hundred pages and it moves. Best for readers who want detective fiction and fantasy at full strength simultaneously, and a good entry point for anyone who has never read either.