A Drop of Corruption (Shadow of the Leviathan #2) by Robert Jackson Bennett

  

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Fantasy, Mystery
Content: Lots of F bombs, Sex that is mostly fade to black or off-page

 

In the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire’s reach, an impossible crime has occurred. A Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—abducted from his quarters while the door and windows remained locked from the inside, in a building whose entrances and exits are all under constant guard.

To solve the case, the Empire calls on its most brilliant and mercurial investigator, the great Ana Dolabra. At her side, as always, is her bemused assistant Dinios Kol.

Before long, Ana’s discovered that they’re not investigating a disappearance, but a murder—and that the killing was just the first chess move by an adversary who seems to be able to pass through warded doors like a ghost, and who can predict every one of Ana’s moves as though they can see the future.

Worse still, the killer seems to be targeting the high-security compound known as the Shroud. Here, the Empire's greatest minds dissect fallen Titans to harness the volatile magic found in their blood. Should it fall, the destruction would be terrible indeed—and the Empire itself will grind to a halt, robbed of the magic that allows its wheels of power to turn.

Din has seen Ana solve impossible cases before. But this time, with the stakes higher than ever and Ana seemingly a step behind their adversary at every turn, he fears that his superior has finally met an enemy she can’t defeat. 

 

I very much enjoyed the first book in this series and I was looking forward to reading this one, but every time I picked this up to read it I would read a little and then put it down. I just figured it was my mood and I would get back to it later. Well, four months later I've finally finished it. I'm not sure what it was about this book that made it so hard for me to get into. Was it that the characters felt a bit off to me? They did but not right from the beginning. I don't know, but I do know that as I got further into the book my lack of interest didn't improve, it got worse. 

Din's and Anna's character's were one's that I liked in the first book. Din much more so than Anna, because she has an abrasive personality, but she intrigued me as a character. She still does a bit, but I thought she was a little overblown in this book. Her eating habits turned my stomach this time around. Her profanity filled sentences had me tuning out instead of taking her seriously.

Din was preoccupied with sleeping around this time. I didn't like this aspect of the story at all. I wanted the version of Din that was in the first book. The Din that wanted to do his job and keep it. This one was depressed and preoccupied. I also didn't care for the time lapse between books. Obviously things happened to these characters that changed them in that period of time that we as readers weren't privy to. 

Clearly I'm in the minority as most people have given this book 4 and 5 star ratings. I've even heard some reviewers say they liked this book better than the first one. I wanted to be able to agree with them. I hoped that putting off finishing this until I felt more in the mood for it, would do the trick. But unfortunately, I don't feel the same way. At this point, I'm not sure I want to continue with the series.

 

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for providing me with and ARC of this book.