Every time a new Robert Jackson Bennett book comes out, I read it way too fast and then feel something I mostly otherwise feel after eating an entire bag of Cadbury mini-eggs: not regret—never!—but longing to return to the start, to experience the whole thing over again. I want to have both the anticipation and joy of discovery, as well as the satisfaction. I’m sure there’s a word for it in German.

Bennett’s books are, I should emphasize, far better for you than candy, and far more elaborately laid out. They’re smart and complex, a whole meal worth savoring, and yet that obsessive snacking impulse remains. You can’t portion them out or be reasonable about them. They must be devoured.

A Drop of Corruption is delicious, and more, it deserves all the non-food-based compliments as well: it’s propulsive, compulsive, tense and intense, engrossing and even, maybe, a little bit gross.

Yes, there’s a bit of body horror and bio-horror here, worthy of the VanderMeer-est Weird. After the more austere coding-magic of his previous Founders Trilogy, this is very much a change of pace, and it works as well as everything Bennett does, which is to say, brilliantly.

The setting, in case anyone’s forgotten since the first book, is what I’d describe as Biohacked Roman Empire with Occasional Kaiju. Huge creatures called Leviathans attack each year, and would ravage the land and everyone in it but not for the Empire’s defenses. But the Leviathans are constantly evolving, and so the defenses must as well. Using insights and reagents gleaned from the Leviathan’s bodies, plus more from the various biomes of the Empire, society has cobbled together ways to enhance human bodies, minds, and medicines.

Our leading man, Din, is one such enhanced citizen. He has perfect recall, which he uses in the service of criminal investigations, and also in his service to Ana, his eccentric and delightfully foulmouthed boss. Ana is an even more highly-modified savant, capable of absorbing and distilling vast amounts of information. This makes her a brilliant detective, and also an enormous pain in the ass. Especially lately, as Din feels internal and external pressures to leave his current position and take up arms defending the Empire more directly from the Leviathans.

Their current case is so unpleasant that it only adds to his motivation. A murder has been committed in a backwater vassal kingdom, not truly part of the Empire, and therefore even more of a densely political powder keg. The victim, a Treasury employee, should have been a small and mostly insignificant part of ongoing negotiations regarding the autonomy (or lack thereof) of the kingdom, but of course there are overlapping and competing conspiracies. Before long, Din and Ana are mired in plots and in the human misery they both arise from and sink to, mostly metaphorically, but also quite literally. The setting is a swamp, and Din can’t help feeling mired at every step.

Din struggles to accept the many degradations of power, and his own place both repairing and perpetuating them. “I was just doing my job” is so often a scathing indictment of moral abdication, the refusal to take responsibility for choices and actions with real and devastating consequences. But it’s also a reflection on human systems, whether empires or kingdoms or industries, that necessarily remove people from full culpability. Once we step beyond individual subsistence—and really, as humans we were never fully independent of each other, we were always social animals—we bear only parts of the responsibility for the systems in which we participate. And we have never fully figured out how to share out that responsibility, although our imperfect justice systems try.

Bennett has always been concerned with the perils of empire, especially the seductions. Empire can be attractive. It can accomplish so much, propel such development. But that achievement always at a cost, and those who bear the cost do not often see the benefits. More even than the last book, Din must contend with those costs at an all-too-intimate distance. Corruption, greed, hubris, and ignorance; madness, slavery, torture, and death.

“I was just doing my job” isn’t just a feeble defense, though. It’s just as much the humble refrain of the public servant, the person taking on more responsibility rather than trying to accept less. Unsung, underpaid, and certainly under-appreciated, those who repair the breaches don’t just help the empire, according to Bennett. They are the Empire, not just the best but the only thing that makes it.

This picks up the same theme Bennett explored in City of Swords, the second book in his Divine Cities trilogy, about what it means to be part of, and to lead, within an organization that uses violence as one of its tools. This time it’s the justice system rather than the military, and as ever, he has a nuanced view. Ever since Vigilance I’ve been impressed with Bennett’s ability to get at the moral complexities underlying the worlds he creates. He never goes for the simple answer, nor does he fall into easy good/evil dichotomies. I think Vigilance never got much attention because it was so bleak. Here, there’s a bit more hope.

Hope—and a heaping helping of schadenfreude. It was extremely satisfying to read about an idiot ruler and his squabbling advisors all getting their comeuppance. But this is not just a takedown. That would be too easy, and Bennett never does easy. A Drop of Corruption does its damnedest to turn our attention to the true heart of the matter: not kings or traditions, but people, and alleviating their suffering.

In the end, Ana pronounces what I think is the most thorough condemnation of a villain that can be managed in this era. With tyrants as with serial killers, to dwell on their misdeeds risks glorifying them, and there seems to be no satire obvious or brutal enough that some people will not take it in earnest. If evil is banal, then we must find some other kind of insult to lob at the most hideous of the billionaires and despots, and Bennett, I think, has found it. The word is boring. And it’s so utterly true: watching a few tech losers appease tyrants, watching despots try to become kings, watching people who think they’re smarter than they are cut corners and risk others—this is the same shit people have done for thousands of years. It’s not special. Dealing with it, we must accept, is generally not special either. Though there can be moments of great glory and searing defiance, mostly the work is that of an exterminator, chasing down the roaches who think they own the place.

Fortunately, unlike so many books in this genre, Bennett actually provides an alternative way forward. As so many fantasy authors are finding, moral complexity on an individual level is no longer enough. There’s a real hunger for works that grapple with what comes after the Dark Lord, what replaces the Mad King and the whole enterprise of monarchy. And Bennett manages to make the building and mending of systems so much more interesting than destruction.

A Drop of Corruption will be published April 1, 2025.