Book of the Day

From the review

Dinios Kol steps off the transport into the farming canton of Sapirdad already counting things: fence posts, the blood dried into the floorboards, the specific way a rancher's hands won't stay still. His engraved memory records everything and forgets nothing, which sounds like a gift until you watch what it costs him. Robert Jackson Bennett has spent two books training readers to notice that Din carries every detail of every awful thing he's ever witnessed, all at once, permanently. In A Trade of Blood he finally has to walk a canton tangled up in his own bloodline, and the effect is like handing a man a photographic memory and then pointing it at his own family. I felt that weight before I even understood the case. Ana Dolabra runs the investigation the way she always does, sealed off from her own senses in a darkened room, working pure abstraction while Din feeds her the raw data from outside. The setup is almost absurdly high-stakes for what starts as one man's murder trial. The accused heir won't explain the blood on his hands, and if Ana can't clear him, a canton that feeds a real slice of the Empire goes to war. Bennett is very good at making a local grudge feel like it could topple a continent, and here he builds that scale out of wheat, cattle, and the plain, grim arithmetic of who eats when a harvest fails. It's a fantasy mystery where the fantastical premise generates the mystery's stakes instead of just decorating them, and that is the hardest trick in the whole subgenre.