The Tainted Cup

What The Tainted Cup is about

In the Empire of Khanum, a great sea wall holds back the leviathans that rise from the ocean every wet season, and a class of engineers keeps that wall standing. Apothetikals use leviathan-derived technology to reshape plants and people, producing modified humans such as engravers, who never forget anything, and axioms, who have a gift for mathematics.

Din Kol is a young engraver with a secret: he has severe dyslexia. He is picked as assistant to Ana Dolabra, an eccentric investigator, and their first case is the poisoning of an engineer inside a wealthy family's mansion. The poison is dappleglass, the same plant that once overran the canton of Oypat and left it sealed off and abandoned. When a leviathan breaches the wall at Tala and more engineers turn up dead in the same way, the pair travel to Talagray to follow the trail.

Part fantasy, part murder mystery, it is also a story about institutions that fail and the ordinary people who pay for it. Readers who like a puzzle with an inventive world around it will find plenty here.

Why The Tainted Cup is on the Rising chart

Its Wikipedia page had 17,679 views last month. The Rising score blends six public signals, each scored from 0 to 100 against the other new books and weighted as shown.

Holding strong Wikipedia attention is steady (within -20% to +25% of the two months before).

The Tainted Cup on the Rising chart: history

First on the chart this month. The history grows with every monthly update.

How we know

This page uses public data: Open Library reader counts and ratings, and Wikipedia page views. The description is paraphrased from real source text (Open Library or Wikipedia). A book is on the Rising chart only if it was published in 2025 or 2026 and its readers are active and its interest is not falling. Rankings reflect reading interest, not quality or sales. Read the full methodology.