Scott Lynch

The Gentleman Bastard — (2006-2010) Author's Description: The Thorn of Camorr is said to be an unbeatable swordsman, a master thief, a ghost that walks through walls. Half the city believes him to be a legendary champion of the poor. The other half believe him to be a foolish myth. Nobody has it quite right. Slightly built, unlucky in love, and barely competent with a sword, Locke Lamora is, much to his annoyance, the fabled Thorn. He certainly didn't invite the rumors that swirl around his exploits, which are actually confidence games of the most intricate sort. And while Locke does indeed steal from the rich (who else, pray tell, would be worth stealing from?), the poor never see a penny of it. All of Locke's gains are strictly for himself and his tight-knit band of thieves, the Gentlemen Bastards. Locke and company are con artists in an age where con artistry, as we understand it, is a new and unknown style of crime. The less attention anyone pays to them, the better! But a deadly mystery has begun to haunt the ancient city of Camorr, and a clandestine war is threatening to tear the city's underworld, the only home the Gentlemen Bastards have ever known, to bloody shreds. Caught up in a murderous game, Locke and his friends will find both their loyalty and their ingenuity tested to the breaking point as they struggle to stay alive…

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Read the prologue of The Republic of Thieves.

Forthcoming:
The Thorn of Emberlain
The Ministry of Necessity
The Mage and the Master Spy
Inherit the Night

The Lies of Locke Lamora: Keep your wallet hidden around the Gentlemen Bastards!!

If you travel to the canal city of Camorr, be warned that it's a city thick with thieves and gangs. And the cleverest of them all is Locke Lamora and the Gentlemen Bastards, but their schemes go very badly awry when the mysterious Gray King and his sorcerous companion move in on the ruling crime boss.

The Lies of Locke Lamora is one of the best and most unique fantasy stories I've read. It's a grand swashbuckling tale of adventure and revenge. Think Thieves' World in Venice with Don Corleone as boss of the crime syndicate, and Farhd and the Grey Mouser as the resident trouble-makers. —Greg Hersom

The Lies of Locke Lamora

Trained from childhood as a thief and con-artist par excellence, Locke Lamora employs a silver tongue and quicksilver mind to divest the rich of Camorr of their excessive wealth.  No sooner do Locke and his associates initiate their latest scheme, however, than they find themselves at the mercy of the mysterious Gray King, who intends to use them as pawns in his bid to take over the city-state's underworld.  As the Gray King's diabolical plan unfolds, Locke finds his skills tested as never before as he struggles not only for his own survival, but also for the survival of his friends and Camorr itself.

In this scintillating debut novel, Scott Lynch establishes himself as a rising star of fantasy fiction.  Like Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind), Lynch is a natural storyteller with a keen intellect and a gift for richly detailed, imaginative world-building and intricate plotting.  Lies is a fast-paced, entertaining, stilettos- (and hatchets-) against-sorcery tale that is both self-contained and well-positioned as a cornerstone for further adventures.  It does have its share of weaknesses: excessive and gratuitous profanity; good but not deeply developed characterization; a few locales that are either too complex to describe or else inadequately described; and a lack of any comment on the human condition or truth that will change one's life.  In short, it's a tale intended as pure entertainment... and as such, it admirably succeeds.

Highly recommended for fans of thieves, caper movies, and well-written sword-and-sorcery.  Recommended with a caveat to fans of high fantasy and anyone distasteful of profanity and violence.  Four gleaming white-iron stars. —Rob Rhodes

The Lies of Locke Lamora

I picked up Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora with high hopes because I've really got a thing for stories about confidence men. I don't know why. I have plenty of faults, but lying and stealing are not sins I commit or condone, and I greatly dislike people who do those things. In fact, I avoid them entirely. So, why I like to read or watch films about conmen, I can't say, but I guess that's something to philosophize about another time...

I did like Locke Lamora. Lynch has created a unique and fascinating world full of wonderful creations such as a crime boss who rules his empire from a houseboat, his little daughter who sits on his lap drinking ale and kicking subordinates with her steel-toed boots, a blind priest who begs for alms and eats gourmet meals off fine plates in his luxurious cellar, noblemen who live in glowing glass towers, a blood-sucking rose garden, alcoholic oranges, and women who fight jumping man-eating sharks for sport. This is truly entertaining stuff!

The pace of the novel was quick and the plot was simple, but interesting. Flashback interludes often broke up the action, which was occasionally irritating. At first I wondered if the editor had dropped the manuscript and not got it put back together in order, but I soon realized that these flashbacks serve to give us information about the world without major info-dumps, and backstory on the characters without having to watch them grow up. The pace escalated during the last 100 pages or so, and I couldn't put it down.

Scott Lynch generally writes very well, but I do have three minor complaints in that regard. First is that the first half of the book is slightly over-written. The dialogue is too witty and clever. The smartest and best-educated people you know would have felt dull-witted while conversing with Locke and his gang of thieves. The narrator, also, tries a bit too hard to impress, and this makes for some slightly awkward prose. But the writing was toned down in the latter half of the book as the action picked up and things got more serious. I expect, now that Mr Lynch has proved himself, his writing style will become more natural, and better for it.

Second is the profanity. While I don't mind reading profanity in a fantasy novel (especially one whose main characters are the dregs of society), if it is overused, it loses its potency. I once remarked to one of my grad school professors that he needed to coin some new curse words because he cursed so much that it was impossible for his students to know when he was really mad. Likewise, Locke and his friends curse so often for no apparent reason that, by the end of the novel, when those words would have been most meaningful and appropriate, they lose all effect and the climactic scenes lose a bit of poignancy. I don't doubt that Locke and his friends would curse as much as Mr Lynch portrays but, since we can't actually hear inflections and tones of voice, Mr Lynch would do better technique-wise to make those words count by using them to give us clues about a character's state-of-mind.

Third, there are 499 pages in my hardback edition, and I think the word "alchemical" was used 499 times in this story. If you've got some friends who want to read The Lies of Locke Lamora with you, I suggest getting together with a bottle of your favorite liquor, appointing a designated reader (and driver), and every time he or she reads the word "alchemical"...

But these are minor complaints — enough to keep this from being a 5-star book, but not enough to keep me from greatly enjoying it. I'm looking forward to the next installment. If there's anything I like nearly as much as stories about confidence men, it's stories about pirates, so the two combined should be just my thing. And I really look forward to exploring more of Scott Lynch's world.  —Kat Hooper

The Lies of Locke Lamora

Never before have I read a book that left me so confused. I wouldn't say I disliked The Lies of Locke Lamora. I also can't say I finished it, either, because I didn't. Why? Well, perhaps the cause of that is worse than dislike. I simply didn't care.

Lynch has a major pacing and priority issue with his writing. For starters, every single chapter is followed by an interlude which is, nearly every time, a snippet from the childhood of Locke and the other Gentlemen Bastards. Perhaps this was to show this stage of Locke's life without making the whole beginning of the book boring. This really backfires, though, because these interludes (which are indeed boring) stick a slice of dull and uninteresting right in the middle of the main plot, interrupting it. I put the book down and read something else in between at one point, because of one of these interludes.

Worse, the interludes can't make you care about the characters. Seems like nothing much can. Lynch is pretty heavy on the descriptive and history details, and while his world is interesting, it takes away too much time from the characters. They have the potential to be a charming lot, the Gentlemen Bastards. Okay, Locke is a little bland for my tastes, but the others are quite fun. Jean, Bug, Fred and George...err, I mean, Calo and Galdo all have a lot of potential as characters. (Yes, if Fred and George from Harry Potter were inserted in a high fantasy book, it would be as Calo and Galdo.)

Unfortunately, because of Lynch's slow start, the over-crowding of details, and a feeling I like to describe as reading in isometric view (for those of you who aren't gamers, think of being a little above and a bit to the side of the action, rather than right smack in the middle of it) a lot of characters never get to meet this potential. They die.

Literally. And while I don't generally have a problem with character death, if the characters have yet to come alive enough, if they're only just starting to become likeable when they meet their ends (and when it's damn near 500 pages in, no less), these deaths mean nothing to me. Of a handful of scenes that were meant to be moving and sad, only one reached me at all. This was not good, because those feelings were very important to whether or not I would care about what happens next.

Also...there's one more Gentleman Bastard, a girl named Sabetha. You hear a lot about her (including that she apparently breaks Locke's heart) but after 500+ pages this character had yet to make a single actual appearance! Not even in any of the interludes! If I'm supposed to believe that she broke Locke's heart and I'm supposed to feel for Locke because of that (or, heck, even believe that she exists!) I need to see some of their interaction. And there's simply no excuse for a book in the 700 page range to not have these things.

So, I've already stated that I never finished the book, so I'm pretty sure you can guess that I was indeed not affected by the characters enough to care. Still, you'd think a rather nicely pulled, shocking ambush would be enough to keep me interested. Well, not when it's followed by yet another interlude. The action cut out, I'd stopped caring about the characters, and so I decided to put the book down once more. I couldn't be bothered to pick it up again. I simply had no more interest.
I'm left not knowing what to do exactly. Though I rarely give a book I can't finish more than a single star, I give this one two. Lynch does have potential and there are some shining moments here, but man, they are completely drowned out by his complete inability to prioritize. Something cool just happened...so why do I need to get a stupid revenge anecdote based around, of all things, handball!? I don't care. Too many of those interludes were irrelevant to what was going on and even those that felt like they were trying to be relevant didn't ring true. They just fell flat.

Before I close this I just have to say that, while I'm a reader of the sort who generally isn't bothered by sex and explicit language in her fantasy (bring it on!) Lynch's characters swear too much even for me. Though it eases up some at certain points, for the most part I just found it getting on my nerves. Realism is great and all but it doesn't always translate. This didn't translate. If a lot of swearing in fantasy tends to be irritating to you, this will make you want to tear your hair out. —Beth Johnson

Red Seas Under Red Skies: Confidence men, thieves, spies, and pirates: All the right people

I don't know what it is about rogues that we fantasy readers love, but Mr. Lynch has given us a new twist to the charismatic thief with his Gentleman Bastard series.

Blessed by the Crooked Warden, Locke and Jean continue their dedicated service to that Nameless Thirteenth, and being a priest and servant of the Thiefwatcher, the Benefactor, Father of Necessary Pretexts, definitely has its fringe benefits. These guys couldn't go to church without snatching the offering plate. But don't let their shenanigans fool you — cross these boys from Camorr, and you'll get a lesson in what vengeance means.

This being only the second book by Scott Lynch, his writing can be just a tad clumsy at times. The story has its lulls but I'm not sure if it's really that it has slow parts or just seems that way in between the parts of intense intrigue and action. Its not quite as good as the first book, Lies of Locke Lamora, but still well-worth the read and I think Mr. Lynch has the potential for becoming one of the more successful and popular authors. —Greg Hersom

Red Seas Under Red Skies

Red Seas Under Red Skies is Scott Lynch’s follow-up to his debut fantasy The Lies of Locke Lamora, and the second in the planned Gentlemen Bastard sequence.  The first book asked the question: what would happen if all the guys from Ocean 11 were teleported into the usual fantasy setting?  Red Seas asks:  what would Brad Pitt and George Clooney do if the rest of Oceans 11 were killed off in movie one?

The answer, of course, is they’d continue to steal. And that’s what happens here. The analogs to Pitt and Clooney are Locke Lamora himself (the title character of book one) and his best friend/partner in crime Jean. The two of them, after suitable mourning of their friends from book one, are now involved in trying to rob the famed Sinspire, the greatest, grandest gambling house in Tel Verrar. 

That caper is the main plotline of Red Seas. But other main plots soon appear, along with a plethora of subplots. Tel Verrar is a city-state dominated by a triad power structure. The head of the Sinspire is one leader, the powerful Archon of Tel Verrar, leader of the army and navy, is another. The merchant’s council is the third. Locke and Jean soon find themselves caught in the power struggle between the Archon and the Sinspire head and, as a result, somehow find themselves becoming pirates for a large chunk of the book. Yes, pirates.

Red Seas has many strengths. Characterization is one. The two main characters are interesting in their own rights but their individual interest is enhanced by their relationship as portrayed throughout the book.  Most of the secondary characters are equally enjoyable and in different fashion. The dialog tends toward sharp banter and there are many laugh-out-loud lines tossed back and forth (the more serious dialog suffers somewhat in comparison, feeling a bit strained sometimes). The various subplots keep the reader hopping and they are nicely juggled, weaving in and out, diverging only to come back seamlessly at the end. The lightness of tone has a darker, more serious balance and while sometimes this is a bit clumsily handled via dialogue, in interior monologue and actual plotting it plays much more strongly and effectively. The structure is highly effective. The book begins with a bang of a scene, then flashes back at a pivotal moment. This shift back and forth continues throughout and is handled quite smoothly, effectively ratcheting up the tension and mystery.

There are a few weak points. Some of the more serious dialog, as mentioned. There is a definite pacing issue when the nautical section of the book begins. The book starts to drag at that point and one wishes Lynch had cut down the lead-in to the pirating adventures severely, but once one moves out of that section the pace picks up again and never flags after that point. The Bondsmagi, who play a major role in both books, are still a bit too abstract for my liking (mysterious is fine but I prefer a somewhat more tangible mystery), as is the greater world around the events.  But these are relatively minor complaints, save for the pacing issue. In the end, Red Seas Under Red Skies delivers, as did The Lies of Locke Lamora.  It’s a fun, mostly fast-paced, humorous read with some a few good caper puzzles at its core. The ending nicely wraps up the main plot while leaving several major questions unanswered, including some pretty urgent ones. Red Seas leaves you happy and wanting more — what more could you ask for?
—Bill Capossere