Fantasy Mysteries Like The Tainted Cup

Some fantasy readers want dragons and battles. Others want a body, a locked room and someone clever enough to work out what happened.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup proved how many of us there are. A murder mystery set in an empire under siege from sea monsters, it became one of the most talked-about fantasy novels in years. The third Ana and Din mystery, A Trade of Blood, has just arrived, and a lot of readers are now looking for more of the same.

Fantasy mysteries work because the world itself becomes a suspect.

A detective in our world knows the rules. Poison works one way. The dead stay dead. In a fantasy world, the investigator has to work out the crime and the rules at the same time, and the reader gets to solve both alongside them.

Here are six fantasy mysteries for readers who want investigation, deduction and a world full of secrets.

If you prefer your fantasy built around archives, cover-ups and institutional power rather than murder, I have also written about the best fantasy novels about secrets, records and power.

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

If you somehow got here without reading it, start with the book that set the standard.

A senior officer is found dead in a country house, killed by a tree that has burst out of his body.

Dinios Kol is sent to record the scene. Din is an engraver, altered so he can remember everything he sees. His job is to be the eyes and ears for Ana Dolabra, an investigator who rarely leaves her rooms, wears a blindfold and solves cases from Din’s reports.

The pairing owes a clear debt to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Ana is brilliant, rude and impossible. Din is careful, anxious and hiding a secret of his own.

Behind the murder sits the empire itself, a state that survives only because its great walls hold back the leviathans every wet season. Every clue Din uncovers points towards a crime that could bring those walls down.

Read it if you want a fair-play mystery with the scale of epic fantasy.

The Justice of Kings by Richard Swan

Sir Konrad Vonvalt is a Justice of the Empire. He travels the provinces as investigator, judge and, when he must, executioner.

The story is told by his clerk, Helena Sedanka, looking back on the case that changed everything. What begins as a murder investigation in a remote town turns into a conspiracy that reaches the heart of the Empire.

Swan was a lawyer before he was a novelist, and it shows. Vonvalt’s power comes from the law, and the law only works while people believe in it. Watching that belief start to crack is the real drama of the book.

Read it if you want a grim, grounded investigation where the detective is also the state.

The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

Thara Celehar can speak to the dead.

Touch a body soon enough after death, and he can learn its last thoughts. In the city of Amalo, that makes him a priest, a witness in court and, more often than he would like, a detective.

When a young woman is pulled from the canal, Celehar sets out to find out who she was and who killed her. The search takes him through opera houses, ghoul-haunted graveyards and the quieter corruption of a city that would rather not know.

It is set in the same world as Addison’s much-loved The Goblin Emperor, but it stands alone. It is gentler than the other books here and full of small kindnesses, but the mystery is solid.

Read it if you want a quiet, humane detective in a richly drawn city.

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

A god is dead, and someone has to find out why.

Kos Everburning powered the city of Alt Coulumb: its trains, its water, its streets. Now he is gone, and the city has days before everything stops.

Tara Abernathy is a first-year associate at a firm of necromancers who work like lawyers. Her job is to investigate the death and bring the god back before anyone notices.

This is the first book in Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, and it treats magic as contract law. Faith is currency. Gods can go bankrupt. Murder becomes a matter of liability as well as guilt.

Read it if you want a mystery where the solution depends on understanding how the world works.

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

Not every fantasy mystery needs a secondary world.

Peter Grant is a probationary constable in the Metropolitan Police. While guarding a murder scene in Covent Garden, he takes a witness statement from a ghost.

That gets him noticed by Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, the last officially sanctioned wizard in England, and Peter becomes his apprentice.

The book is a proper police procedural, full of paperwork, overtime and canteen gossip, except the suspects include river gods and something very old is wearing people’s faces.

Read it if you want a funny, very British urban fantasy that still plays fair as a mystery.

Silent Watcher by Jon Cronshaw

This one is mine.

Anselma Versen is a Watcher, a member of an order whose job is to observe events and write the official record. She arrives in the isolated town of Halborg under a false name to look into the death of another Watcher.

The official report says it was an accident. Anselma is soon sure it was murder.

The streets have been scrubbed clean. Witnesses give the same rehearsed answers. Records vanish overnight. Then she finds reports carrying her own signature, authorising operations she never witnessed, dated to days she cannot remember.

Like Din in The Tainted Cup, Anselma is a trained observer. The difference is that the institution she reports to may have already decided what the truth is allowed to be.

It sits somewhere between a murder mystery and a spy thriller. I have written more about what a John le Carré novel looks like in a fantasy world and why staged rebellions make great political fantasy, both of which fed into the book.

Silent Watcher is a standalone, so you do not need to have read any of my other books. It is out now in Kindle, paperback and audiobook.

What These Fantasy Mysteries Understand

The best fantasy mysteries make the investigator pay for the truth.

Din risks his secret. Vonvalt risks his authority. Tara risks her career. Anselma risks finding out that the people she serves are the ones she should be investigating.

In each book, solving the crime means understanding the world: who holds power, how it is used and what the official story is hiding.

That is why the genre works so well. The murder is the way in. The world is the real mystery.

Where to Start With Fantasy Mysteries

For a classic detective double act in an empire under siege, start with The Tainted Cup.

For law, power and a conspiracy that reaches the throne, read The Justice of Kings.

For a gentle, compassionate investigator, pick up The Witness for the Dead.

For a mystery built on magical contract law, try Three Parts Dead.

For a police procedural with ghosts and river gods, read Rivers of London.

And for a murder investigation that turns into a conspiracy written in the investigator’s own hand, try Silent Watcher.

Claim Your Free Starter Library

Silent Watcher is set in the Ravenglass Universe, a world of wyvern riders, fallen empires and institutions that keep more secrets than they should.

If you want to explore it, my free Starter Library gives you five books, five doors into the world, sent straight to your Kindle.

Claim your free Starter Library here.

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