Lies of Locke Lamora

A plot summary, taken from about halfway through my original post and now transplanted at the beginning:

In a fantasy city like Venice filled with the remains of majestic golden "elderglass" structures built long ago by mysterious beings, a young boy found with the orphans of the plague follows the Thiefmaker home. He gets in trouble almost immediately for stealing from some guards, and later enacts a plot to get an older orphan in trouble that results in he and another boy getting executed. When the Fagin character finds out he was tricked, Locke is then sold to the blind priest of the god of charity who turns out to not be blind, and actually a priest of a secret heretical god of thieves. He pledges himself to the mafia don, who maintains a "secret peace" where thieves and scoundrels can get away with all sorts of mischief as long as they don't get caught if they never target the actual nobility. The priest on the other hand raises his orphans to do exactly that.

Flashforward a decade or two and the Gentleman Bastards are running a con on a noble, making him think that war is coming in a foreign country and they need his help to secret the alchemical wine from Emberlaine to Camorr. Then the real con begins as they dress up as Midnighters, the mysterious and mythical duke's secret police, to tell the marks that they're being had by the equally mythical Thorn of Camorr, and they should keep helping him and give him whatever he wants so that they can catch him. This twist to let the marks know they're marks but still keep giving him money turns out to be a bad idea when the wife of the pair knows an old woman with connections to the Midnighters, because she is actually herself The Spider, their equally mysterious and presumed fictional leader, and the old lady confirms that they didn't know about the Thorn of Camorr ripping off the marks... but now they do.

Meanwhile, in the criminal underworld a man known as the Grey King is killing off Capa Barsavi's top garristas, cutting the heads off of his most loyal gangs. Barsavi has holed up on his pirate barge in the middle of a ship graveyard, and is afraid to leave the Floating Grave. He's not happy about the situation, and when Locke comes to pay his taxes, Barsavi is violently torturemurdering the last two of six people who very clearly didn't know shit about why they couldn't remember the night their garrista died. But Barsavi does offer Locke the opportunity to marry his daughter, the crafty and brilliant treasurer of his opportunity, and a woman who would be Capa herself if not for the fact that her brothers would throw a fit. His position as her husband would allow him to influence and tutor the son who does become king. She and Locke want to keep him happy, but also don't like each other that way, and agree to work towards a way out of it. Not that it matters.

The Grey King kidnaps Locke and forces him to take his place at a meeting with Barsavi, revealing that he has a Bondsmage at his service, one of the extremely powerful sorcerers who require exorbitant payment for their services. If he refuses, he'll tell Capa Barsavi that Locke has 40,000 crowns worth of money stolen from the aristocracy, and has flouted the secret police, which would get him super murdered. After Locke finishes telling his crew all of this, Barsavi's men come calling. Whoops, turns out the Grey King killed Nazca, and stuffed her in a barrel of horse piss. Guess the marriage is off. But Barsavi wants Locke and his big beefy best friend to come along. To kill the Grey King. Who will actually be Locke.

Some shenanigans happen, Locke fakes being sick with the help of alchemy, then dresses up as the Grey King and gets the shit beat out of him. The summary on Wikipedia says Barsavi's men found out a way around Locke's magical protection, but I'm pretty sure other than the arrow stopping thing, the wizard didn't actually protect him at all, because they wanted Locke to get the shit kicked out of him. If you actually are trying to magically protect someone, you won't forget to protect against bruising. Either way, they beat the shit out of Locke and seal him in a barrel of horse piss and toss it overboard. Jean saves him, though. Then Locke washes the piss off of himself and goes home, only to find two of his friends lying on the floor of their secret rooms with their throat slit, and then a hidden assassin murders the twelve year old. Also all their money and shit is gone. So they beat the assassin up for answers and then burn their home down. Locke goes to the after party in a disguise and sees as The Grey King comes out and murders Barsavi and his family by revealing that Barsavi's big twin bodyguards were actually doublecrossing him.

Then Locke passes out from vomiting up everything he ate in the last week, getting the shit kicked out of him, being drowned in horse piss, getting into a fight, and doing a lot of walking back and forth. He wakes up two days later, there's a bit of an ordeal as he tries to steal some fancy clothes so that he can continue conning that noble couple, except they now know that he's double conning them, and they're going to double con him and at the fancy rich people party they fill the place with secret police, and have him meet the little old lady Spider who poisons him, but he punches her and steals the antidote and flees. Meanwhile, Jean has been watching as the Grey King, now calling himself "Capa Raza", (basically Don Revenge) is giving aid to a plague ship, and they realize that the plague ship is actually being given all their stolen money. He then gets into a fight with the shark fighting twin bodyguards, who turn out to be Raza's sisters. He murders them.

Locke falls for the marks' con and is nearly killed by the super-secret police, but he escapes. When he comes home, he finds Jean being magically tortured by the Bondsmage, who is still being employed. He uses Jean's true name to get him to kill Locke, but decides it would be better the other way around, and while he believes Locke's surname is a fake, his first name will be good enough. Locke starts to move to kill Jean, but surprise, "Locke Lamora" is an alias and the Falconer didn't realize this, so they beat up the wizard and just brutally fucking torture the shit out of him, and cut out his tongue. They don't kill him, though, because if you kill a wizard every other wizard stops what they're doing to murder everyone you ever met.

They learn that Raza gave the Spider four statues to put in the big rich people party tower, and they're actually time bombs that when they go off will burn the "wraithstone" hidden within, the smoke of which turns anything that breathes it in "gentle"; i.e. it's a magical lobotomy, and the rich people's children are all at the top of the tower, where the smoke will rise. Locke has to convince the little old lady he punched that she was magically coerced and the statues are bombs, then that he should trust him. Raza was the son of a merchant who knew about the Secret Peace and wanted in on it, but wasn't a noble, so he was told to fuck off and then brutally assassinated, but three of his children got away because the Maid took them as hers. Raza has been trying to get his revenge ever since, on The Spider, Barsavi, and the entire Secret Peace system. She finally realizes that she's under a spell and snaps out of it, they deal with the statues, yadda yadda. Then Locke tells her to sink the plague ship because it's Raza's backup plan. She lets him go just this once.

Locke confronts Raza at Barsavi's old pirate ship and he sees the plague ship blowing up and the tower not filling with smoke, and he knows his sisters are dead, so he fights with Locke and Locke gets stabbed and there's a reference to "I only need to hold you until Jean returns" and you think Jean is going to be there like last time and Raza turns in surprise, but no, Locke was just bluffing, so he gets in the kill and stumbles off to nearly die until Jean does come. In the end, they sail off to somewhere else, with Locke whispering to Jean his real name after Jean whined about not knowing it. We also learn that Locke intentionally had The Spider sink the plague ship with all the money he stole from the nobles because there's a ritual for people of the thief religion where they steal something expensive or some money and toss it into the waters when a friend dies, and Locke just gave Bug and the Sansas a 40,000 crown burial.

That was long and meandering, but I'm pretty sure I remembered the important parts.

I think I'll start with what I did like, since I know this is a fairly well liked book. Spoilers ahead, in case you somehow didn't grasp that from context, or the [Spoilers, obviously] in the title. Almost all of the characters, particularly the Gentleman Bastards themselves, are really good. They all have little quirks that quickly endear you to them. The Sansa twins are mischievous and playful, teasing people and being that "horny but not threatening and supposedly luckless" type of character. They're twins and finish each other's sandwiches. Jean is constantly reading, despite being the big heavyset bruiser. Bug is a precocious twelve year old who drinks and I could tell from the start that he'd get killed in some horrible way. And he did, but so did the Sansas, which came as a shock. That was part of the reason I ended up staying awake until six or seven, having listened to about a fourth of the audiobook while playing Zelda, for the record.

Chains was also an interesting character. I'm always fond of thieves and liars, and people who try to get one over on the rich. The whole aspect of the religion of the Crooked Warden is really good. "The Necessary Pretext". I love that, and I love that Chains and adult Locke are priests of the thief god. But Chains also leads into some of what I didn't like.

The first thing is Sabatha. She's treated as if she's an important character, and it's very clear that she's some redhead that Locke was in a relationship with and fucked it up. She was one of the Gentlemen Bastards. But she's also completely absent, even from the flashbacks. This honestly makes her feel like she isn't part of Locke's life, even though she reasonably should be. She's brought up maybe three times in easily forgettable moments.

Sabatha also kind of highlights just how little women show up in the novel, which I'm sure some people will balk at me mentioning. Doña Sophia and Doña Vorchenza are probably the most prominent female characters, but even they barely show up much. The Spider turns out to frankly not really be that big a threat. The Berangia Sisters factor into the twist, but they don't really... matter. It's all Raza's plan. They're barely a part of it, other than that they were moles in Barsavi's inner circle, but them being moles never really mattered, other than that they slowly poisoned his wife. I guess they could have been the ones to kill Nazca, but if that's the case it's never actually brought up. Nazca herself is given juuuust enough time for us to know that she's close to Locke, though barely more than that, and then she's killed in a gruesome and insulting way. Female characters are said to get stuffed in a fridge, but being stuffed in a barrel of horse piss is quite a bit extreme.

The other problem Chains brings up is just what the Gentleman Bastards are and what they do. I can't quite remember the specific phrasing [a downside of audiobooks; I've already had to google to doublecheck names], but Chains says he's training the Bastards to break the Secret Peace, and from what I recall it felt more akin to "break" or "shatter" or "right through the heart", but in the end they simply flout it. Not only that, but Locke has gotten a reputation as being a rather lackluster but loyal garrista, giving Capa Barsavi what seems like a reasonable cut of the things that the Bastards have "stolen" each time it comes to pay the taxes. He's stolen from the nobility at least four times and already earned the nickname The Thorn of Camorr, but frankly I have no fucking idea why, when he seems to be friendly with Barsavi and his family; certainly with Nazca at least, even if he's only friendly enough to play cards with the sons.

It certainly doesn't seem like he actually wants to upset the balance between the law and the Right People. He doesn't really have any motive, really. Besides stealing because it's heaps of fucking fun, which is certainly a good enough reason for a priest of the Crooked Warden, but you'd think there'd be a bit more to it, even if it was a "we'll know one day when the time comes" sort of thing. At the end of the day, it barely matters, except that having a pile of money is what makes Locke a target for Raza. But that leads into another thing that I can't say I like.

What really underwhelmed me was the actual... plot of the book. The Lies of Locke Lamora was actually suggested to me way back when, probably over a decade ago. It was something someone suggested as a heist novel, but really there isn't anything remotely like a heist involved. I'll be honest, there's a reason I've read Mistborn three or four times but I only just got around to this one now. This is where I originally write that long meandering plot summary that I moved to the beginning.

It's... a lot. The important bit is Raza's motivations. He was the son of a merchant who knew about the "Secret Peace" between Capa Barsavi and the Duke, and who was murdered for knowing about it. Three of his children survived, and they became Raza and the Berangia sisters. One of the reasons that Raza is able to pull his plan off is that he has a bondsmage at his service. Two entire interlude chapters are devoted to Bondsmages. They're the only wizards that exist, and they're ridiculously expensive to hire. I get the impression that you basically have to be Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to afford one for an extended period. Barsavi mentions that he could maybe hire one for a very short while, and the Bastards' plan was originally to just blow town for a few days because no one keeps a bondsmage around without something for them to do, because they're just that expensive. Kings don't even keep them on retainer. Raza would have had to have one for several weeks, possibly even months, even before he ripped off the Bastards and put that 40,000 to another week or two of the Bondsmage.

The reveal comes from Locke torturing the Falconer, the Bondsmage who has a magical "Scorpion Hawk" as a pet. It's a bird with scorpion stingers for talons. Raza was able to afford him because... he's been a corsair. Yup. That's the reveal. He became richer than most nobility through piracy. And he was able to pull off his schemes to take over the underworld by... just bribing people, I guess. He already had men who were loyal to him in place when he murdered Barsavi so that they could kiss the ring and make a show of things, as well as killing all Barsavi's guards. That's... kind of underwhelming?

Like, at the end of it all, Raza doesn't care about Locke. He picks Locke to be the one to play him at the meeting and get his ass kicked because The Falconer snooped around and found out that the Gentleman Bastards are filthy fucking rich. That's it. That's their connection to everything. So whatever plans to fuck the Secret Peace or tweak the noses of the powerful that Locke and the Bastards were meant for gets more or less tossed out. His wedding to Nazca gets tossed out. The plan to con the Salvarras out of half their money was still on, but they end up conning him and at the end of the day, even that doesn't matter because it quickly gets resolved because the little old lady who commands the secret police didn't think the man she poisoned would punch her in the face and climb down the elevator. Which, I can see why, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really mean much, since he comes waltzing right back and needs to convince her that he's not lying about the bombs.

It just feels a bit random. The master thieves are so careful not to ever be found out get found out. Not by slipping up or being too clever (well, they were that, but only to The Spider, not the Falconer, who found their secret base), but because about a third of the way through the book, literal fucking wizards are introduced, and one of them just snooped on them and discovered their secret vault full of money.

Hell, it felt like there would be a big twist to Raza having a Bondsmage that stayed with him for so long since so much was placed on that, but, nope, the big twist is that Raza was rich from piracy. A pirate you'd never heard about before now. Raza's sisters are the Berangia twins, the two shark fighting gladiators that Barsavi hired to become his personal bodyguards and killers. They barely factor into the plan, as I said before. They just... because champion shark fighters, because that would lead to Capa Barsavi hiring them to kill people, I guess? That seems very random and roundabout. What if Barsavi didn't think that killing sharks translated well to killing people? Then they fight Jean, and it's a good enough fight I guess, and they reveal that they killed Calo and Galdo, the Sansa twins, and Jean fights with his dual hatchets that he calls the Wicked Sisters, so there's a line like "wicked sisters, meet the Wicked Sisters", but it doesn't... it doesn't get weight. It doesn't feel like they matter. A lot of events that might be cool in and of themselves don't feel like they have weight, or matter.

Like, there's this whole extended sequence where Locke tries three times to steal a suit from specifically a law clerk so that he can go meet the Don and Dona. I have no idea why he kept trying to scam a 40 crown suit out of a law clerk for 5 crowns, and I had assumed it had something to do with them needing the key to their extra cash, which they couldn't get because the key was in the bank and they didn't have their papers anymore. But nope, he just... thought the bank was a good place to get a suit? There's even a scene where he's seen wearing the suit he conned out of the bank manager and the manager realizes that's his suit, and he bluffs something like "ah, I'm glad you like it, I had it made in your style because you were so stylish" and that hollow lie passes. It was a cute little scene, and if I stretch it plays into the fact that the wealthy don't mention The Thorn of Camorr out of embarrassment from getting poked. But that feels like I'm filling in blanks, not that the book is telling me this with a wink.

There's a lot of moments like that. The weapon master that Jean is sent to in the flashbacks says that he grew up a farmer. In another one, later, Chains reveals that he and the weapons master came from the same village and became soldiers. That's about it. They did good soldiering. In a different flashback Jean becomes an acolyte of the death goddess—the Bastards all learn to pass themselves off as priests of the different gods, who never smite them because they look the other way on their little brother's priests getting up to chicanery—and after being poisoned and deliriously rambling about being closer to death than most others, he gets a promotion and fakes his own death to avoid dealing with the "perks", like swimming with sharks or constantly being poisoned. He then later fakes having been robbed so that he can get some robes and pass himself off as a Priest of Aza Guilla. And then... well, that's it. He gets caught snooping anyway, and he might as well have just been hiding in the shadows as wearing the outfit.

Honestly, the biggest meaningless callback is to Locke saying "I just have to hold you until Jean gets here". In a flashback, the Bastards get beaten up by another gang of tots, who attack when Jean isn't around. Later Locke tricks the leader into attacking him and uses a specially designed outfit to wrap his sleeve around the older boy and hold him tied to Locke until Jean can get here. In the climactic final battle, he gets stabbed right through by Raza and basically holds the blade saying the same thing as before except Jean doesn't actually come, it was a feint, and Locke gets in a good blow. It felt like a fake out to the audience as well as to Raza, who wouldn't even get that reference.

The novel is long and meandering, and there's a lot of stuff that just doesn't really ever matter. And a lot of the stuff that does doesn't feel like it was given enough time or lead up. It's hard to care about any of the people who died when other than Nazca, I'm not sure Locke even gave a shit about them, and Nazca herself only got two scenes, one where a drunken six year old Locke swears to be her pezon, and one where adult Nazca implores Locke to do as her father says to make him happy and then that she also doesn't want to marry Locke, but they'll figure it out later. The twists all sort of come out of nowhere. The Secret Peace is a known thing when the novel starts, that even gets explained in the prologue, but Raza is an unknown. There's no lead up to his backstory being revealed. The only hint that he's related to the Berangias is that Locke finds him familiar. I thought it would turn out to secretly be Sabetha, or Nazca. The secret of how he earned the exorbitant money for a wizard is just "he's secretly the best pirate ever". His plan to gentle the entire aristocracy, a fate worse than death that even an anarchist like me thinks is a bit much, especially to do to the children, is only found out when the protagonists torture a man and threaten to cut out his tongue. At least the concept of gentling and how creepy the results are is set up early on, and given an interlude to explain it well before this.

I did like it, though. I liked a lot of it. I liked the setting itself, and the city of Camorr. I liked the traces of weird, alien precursors. I liked the Nameless Thirteenth and his religion of thieves. Overall, I really want to read more, but at the same time, I also don't really care to. It'll be a new setting, now that Locke has left Camorr, and of the five Gentleman Bastards, now there are two. This book won awards, and it's well received, but it also feels... kind of amateurish? Not as tight as it could be, at least. Not as tight as I'd expected. And it certainly isn't a fantasy heist story.

Anyway, that was long as hell. I spent most of the day typing this up, and I'm sure my retelling and review is also a bit meandering. Also now it's time for everyone to tell me that I'm wrong and my opinion sucks and actually it's a great novel.