The Lies of Locke Lamora is the adult version of Cornelia Funke's The Thief Lord. On steroids, after drinking a Monster--no make that 4 Monsters. And a cup of coffee.

THE PLOT

What's astonishing about this story is how the main plot doesn't even come into play until halfway into the book, and yet I didn't once think of putting it down during the set-up in the first half.

So the book begins from the pov of a minor character who will never show up again. Normally these openings suck because they give you a false sense of who the protagonist is and what the story is actually about. But that wasn't the case with TLoLL! Never did I lose sight of that fact that even though this first chapter was told by the Thiefmaker, this is Locke's story.

We start from the pov of the Thiefmaker, who meets with a "blind" priest, trying to sell him a young boy. The dialogue in this scene creates beautiful buildup of how conniving, threatening, and epic Locke is even though he's like 5 years old.

The Thiefmaker is this old dude who goes around collecting orphans and training them to be the city's greatest thieves. What's most fascinating about this set-up is not that they all live in a cemetary (though that's pretty awesome!) but that there are HUNDREDS of these little thieves-in-making running around. They have an elaborate hierarchy of power, a system to keep everyone doing their job and complying with the Thiefmaker's demands.

And here we have little Locke Lamora throwing a huge wrench into the system. Even though we only spend a chapter (or two? I can't remember) with the Thiefmaker, we start to see just how bad Locke is if he can make the freaking Theifmaker sweat.

Locke is a genius in thievery and conning, too much so to stay with the Thiefmaker. Because of him, a dozen of his fellow thieves are killed. Now, Locke should die for his actions too, but he's just too valuable of an asset to waste, so the Thiefmaker makes a latch-ditch effort to sell him to another thieving gang and get this troublesome boy off his hands. He succeeds in selling Locke to Chains, a thief pretening to be a blind priest who permanently chained himself to the temple (but not really; it's just an act) in a display of his faith.

And here the story ... still hasn't begun. But that's okay because this book is so awesome anyway. I'll explain in a bit.

The story is told in a non-linear fashion, so during the first 1/3 of the book, it goes back and forth between Locke's childhood under Chains's wing and when he's an adult and Chains has passed away, giving Locke control of the gang.

This non-linear storytellings works to a great effect. Locke is pulling off some heist as an adult, and then it shifts back to the past to give us the backstory of how Chains trained him, how he came to meet the members of his gang and create a strong bond with them. Normally, it would seem like all the past scenes are irrelevant--it's just backstory and we don't need to see it to understand the main plot. That's kind of true.

BUT

Everything is so well written telling witty, hilarious, and ingenious stories of Locke's cons as a child. I was too fascinated with the sheer detail put into the worldbuilding and set-up to care that it wasn't pushing forward the main plot. Even though Lynch broke a fundamental rule about infodumping and cutting out irrelevant scenes, he did it so well that I didn't care and found it thoroughly enjoying anyway. More on his infodumping/worldbuilding later.

Back to the non-linear storytelling. There was one scene that really stuck in my mind becuase of how well he utilized a non-linear device.

**SPOILERS**

Locke is trying to con these rich people out of all their money, and everything's going great until we get an omniscient scene showing a shady guy step out of the shadows and REVEAL LOCKE'S PLOT to them! I'm like: OH NO!

But then the next scene switches back to Locke a few hours earlier, and we find out he was the shady guy! And revealing the plot was all part of his reverse psychology plan.

**END SPOILERS**

It was one of those revelation moments that stopped me in my tracks and I sat there dumbfounded for a few minutes. It was really smart.

Finally about halfway through, we get a proper villain and plot and Locke has to stop him, yaddayaddayadda. Nothing of note to report here. But it was GOOD. Many, many plot twists. Lynch does things to his characters that most authors wouldn't dream of, which was really mindblowing to me. His imagination for torture is terrifying.

The climax was great--there were several big moments leading up to the ending, which was so emotional that my heart nearly broke in two. The immediate aftermath of the final battle had one of the biggest emotional impacts I've read in a high fantasy. I'm not sure everyone would agree, but the scene really hit a strong note with me.

THE CHARACTERS

Locke is a fantastic protagonist. He's charismatic, funny, crude, a genius, an insanely good liar, confident, and a great leader. You'd think he fit the bill of a Gary Stu, but I never thought that. He's just too interesting to hate!

There was a moment when I thought he might be sociopathic--on top of the compulsive lying, and possible conduct disorder, a friend of his was killed, but he had zero emotional reaction to losing her. He was hella pissed at her murderer, but he never grieved for her. I'm not sure if that was Lynch's intent or it was just a poorly written scene. I'm just going to go with Locke didn't have an emotional attachment to this character, because later he really shows grief and guilt for other losses in his life. He also caused the death of many comrades while he was still with the Thiefmaker, and his only emotion was anger at himself for messing up, absolutely no compassion for the lives of his comrades. So who knows?

Anyway, so during most of the book Locke's endeavors always worked. His schemes and heists progressed smoothly, sometimes better than expected. The moment I realized this, I was like: "waittt.... I'm seeing parallels with Steelheart's Gary Stu protagonist... not good." But just a few chapters after I had that thought, Locke started to fail. MISERABLY. He literally fails in the worst imaginable way possible, and then he keeps getting beaten up or found out. It's like all the luck he'd had suddenly vanished.

I was thrilled to see this! So often the author makes the mistake of always making their protagonists succeed. Every plan, even if it's made up on the spot, works out. That was one big criticism I had of Steelheart's protagonist, if you read that review of mine.

So Locke is great. His gang members... One of them was nicely fleshed out with his own backstory and everything. But then there were these twins who were just ... generic twins. They had the same personanlity, I couldn't tell them apart, and they really played no major role other than stand-in extras to heists and scenes. There wasn't any character development with them. If I had to criticize one thing from this book, it'd be the characterization of those two, but honestly that's so minor, and everything else in the book is done so well, that it's just nitpicking.

The villains were awesome. They were 3-dimensional and had hopes and dreams and fears and desires and families. We had a chapter at the end from one villain's pov, and I caught myself almost feeling sorry for him from the hopeless, grief-stricken way it was written. Even though this guy was a mass muderer. But then I came to my senses. Kudos to Lynch for making me momentarily feel sympathy toward the most despicable character in his book.

THE WORLDBUILDING

Set in a fantasy equivalent of Venice, instead of roads there are canals and boats! Really cool set-up to the world.

I . . . really don't know where to start explaining how epic the worldbuilding was. Lynch put an obsessive amount of detail into it, building up the religions, the currency, the hierarchy, the buildings/architecture, the culture, the food, and dress. It was mind-boggling.

Many would argue there was too much worldbuilding. Lynch would have pages and pages of just worldbuilding, which normally is a big writing no-no. There were even entire chapters simply dedicated to describing some element that would become important later. Someone told me they couldn't finish the book because there were so many infodumps.

Personally I didn't mind the infodumps because they were interesting! The world fascinated me, and the way Lynch talked about it, using wit and drama, painted an epic picture that I couldn't stop looking at. I do think there were some moments the details got heavy-handed and were becoming a little too much, too irrelevant, but overall just experiencing and exploring the world was great fun.

THE WRITING

Awesome. Lynch is a master wordsmith. His prose and dialogue is witty and humorous. I was smiling and laughing so much throughout the first half of this book because of the way he relayed some information. Every other line seemed to have something hilarious in it. It wasn't a comedy, not at all, but there was definitely some great humor in Lynch's writing.

Overall, this lands at the top of my list of favorite books of all time, tied with The Catcher in the Rye, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Thee Musketeers (Why do all my favorite books start with "The"...?) It was so, so good, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves a good thief story and exploring well-thought-out fantasy worlds.

5/5 stars