The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch.

The Lies of Locke Lamora (The Gentleman Bastard Sequence #1) by Scott Lynch.

This book is: giving me conflicting feelings.
Other elements: fabulous con men, creative fantasy world, thieves, friendship.
Read it: if you like a good con man and you don’t mind a lot of description.
Overall rating: 7.4/10

I thought I was going to love this book. I love a good con man, especially when he’s working with other good con men to do really sneaky things. This book has a fantastic band of thieves. They’re jaunty, they’re clever, they’re resourceful, and they banter. They even have a great name – the Gentlemen Bastards. You get to witness their thief training, which is another thing that I love to read about.

Then, about 1/3 of the way in, the story takes a turn and I became unsure about how much I liked it. I actually put the book down for a whole week and only returned to it because the library due date was approaching. The story redeemed itself somewhat by the end, but I still can’t say I loved it. There’s a sequel, but I’m not sure if I’m going to track it down or not yet.

Let’s break it down by pros and cons. I’m not going to use any specific spoilers, but if you like to have no hints at all about what’s going to happen in a book you may not want to read the rest of this review.

Pros:

• Con men! They’re resourceful and entertaining, with vaguely Robin Hood-like motivation. This gives me a crush on them.
• Interesting, extensive, and detailed universe with creative fantastical details.
• Really well thought out fictional society. This author knows exactly how his fictional city is laid out, who makes up which classes of people, where they all live, what their houses look like, which holidays they celebrate, which gods they believe in, and who hates who. It’s really impressive.
• Excellent description of certain very beautiful aspects of said fictional world. Ex: glass palace, alchemical gardens, razor-sharp garden made of glass flowers.
• Strong female characters. The lead characters are all men, but they meet with (and are occasionally thwarted by) strong, smart, and powerful women.
• Multi-faceted and interesting main characters.
• Really cool thief training scenes and thief-like hijinks.
• Sharks.

Cons:

• A little too much time spent describing said interesting, extensive, and detailed universe’s fantastical details.  This book could have been 50 pages shorter and lost nothing. (Although it is a really cool world.)
• Excessively tragic events. I know you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet and I do hate authors who are afraid to upset their readers, but come on. Was it necessary to make things THIS bad for him?
• Overly powerful villain. Even Voldemort has weaknesses. I spent a lot of this book thinking “wow, there really is no way around this guy, is there?”
• Slightly deus ex machina feel to the way they do defeat said powerful bad guy. It’s sort of a “You seem to be about to defeat me…except for this FACT THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING” kind of deal.
• The lead characters are all men. There is no female character who gets the last word or the final triumph over any of the main male characters. The women win some battles but no wars.

So there you have it. There were things about this book that I really liked and other things that I really disliked. Please read it and discuss it with me so that I can figure out how I feel.

Want more? Visit my Books page here, or go straight to my ShopMy list of fiction I love here.

This post contains affiliate links.