The Tainted Cup. Book 1

The first book in the Shadow of Leviathan trilogy from the Hugo Award nominee for best fantasy novel of 2025.

It’s a terrifying pre-dawn hour. A lone investigator arrives at a noble estate where a murder has occurred... But the cause of death was not a dagger or a bullet, but a branched tree that grew from the victim’s body.

The case is extraordinary, even by the standards of the Khanum Empire, where mushrooms cool the air in houses, tree fruits glow in the dark, and giant leviathan monsters emerge from the depths of the sea every year and attack the coast of the Empire. So the investigators who take on the case are unusual: the young Dinios Kol, endowed with a supernatural memory, and his experienced mentor, the mysterious Anagosa Dolabra, whose genius borders on madness. They soon begin to suspect that the dead man strung up by a tree is involved in a terrifying conspiracy capable of destroying the foundations of an entire Empire.

Translated into Ukrainian for the first time.