What to Read After The Lies of Locke Lamora
Scott Lynch's debut is one of the sharpest heist fantasies ever written: a morally grey crew of con artists in a Renaissance-inspired city, a narrator who is performing his own legend even as he tells it, and a plot that keeps revealing new layers of the plan underneath the plan. What makes it so hard to replicate isn't the heist — it's the voice. These eight books come closest to capturing what makes Locke Lamora work: the theatrical wit, the ensemble chemistry, the morally grey crew, and the sense of watching someone who is always twelve steps ahead of everyone else in the room — until they aren't.
- 1
Six of Crows
by Leigh Bardugo
The closest thing to Locke Lamora in modern fantasy: an ensemble crew of misfits with complementary skills, a leader who thinks twelve steps ahead, and a heist structure that keeps revealing new layers of the plan. Where Lynch's prose is theatrical and comic, Bardugo's is sharper and more emotionally direct — but both series are fundamentally about a found family of criminals who are better at heists than at feelings. Start here if you want the same ensemble energy in a complete duology.
- 2
Mistborn: The Final Empire
by Brandon Sanderson
A heist fantasy built around the premise that the Dark Lord already won: a crew of outlaws plans to topple an immortal god-emperor using a magic system that works like a precision tool. Sanderson lacks Lynch's wit and the prose is more functional, but the heist architecture is equally intricate and the magic system — metals ingested to gain abilities — is one of the most satisfying in the genre. The payoff is enormous and the series is complete.
- 3
The Way of Shadows
by Brent Weeks
A street boy is apprenticed to the most feared assassin in a city of corruption, and the training nearly destroys what made him worth saving. Weeks builds a grimy, beautifully realized city in the same vein as Camorr, and the Night Angel trilogy's moral weight — the cost of skills that only hurt people — echoes Lynch's interest in what criminality actually does to a person. Darker than Locke Lamora, less funny, and just as hard to put down.
- 4
Kings of the Wyld
by Nicholas Eames
Retired adventurers are treated like aging rock stars in a world that has moved on from their heyday — until one of their daughters is trapped in a besieged city and her father has to reassemble the old crew. Eames has Lynch's comic timing and his love of the ensemble dynamic, and Kings of the Wyld subverts its genre conventions toward warmth in the same way that Gentleman Bastards does — with great affection for exactly the conventions it's taking apart. The sharpest recent heir to Lynch's tone.
- 5
The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss
A legendary figure narrates his own rise from street orphan to the most feared man in the world — with complete control over which parts of the story you see and what you're allowed to believe. Rothfuss and Lynch share a fascination with the narrator-as-performer: Kvothe constructs his legend as deliberately as Locke constructs a con. The prose is more lyrical than Lynch's, the magic more rigorously built, and the mystery of how a legend becomes a broken man in a country inn is as compelling as any heist Lynch has written.
- 6
The City of Brass
by S.A. Chakraborty
A con artist and street thief in 18th-century Cairo accidentally summons a djinn and is pulled into a world of ancient politics and supernatural power she doesn't understand. Chakraborty builds her world with the same density Lynch brings to Camorr — the city of Daevabad is as vivid as the Thorn of Camorr's city, and the protagonist's specific skill set (deception, quick thinking, zero magical power) maps closely onto Locke's approach to problems. The Daevabad trilogy is complete.
- 7
Best Served Cold
by Joe Abercrombie
A standalone revenge story in the First Law world: a general betrayed by her employer assembles a crew of killers, criminals, and the morally compromised to work through a list of seven targets. Abercrombie's assembly-of-rogues structure and his dark humor sit very close to Lynch's register, and Best Served Cold works as a standalone — no prior First Law reading required. The grimmer, more violent companion piece to Gentleman Bastards.
- 8
The Black Company
by Glen Cook
The original mercenary band fantasy: a company of soldiers hired to serve an evil sorceress narrates their own morally compromised history through a series of campaign journals. Cook invented the grimdark mercenary aesthetic that Abercrombie and Lynch both inherited, and The Black Company's episodic, tight, darkly funny prose reads like a direct ancestor of Locke Lamora's voice. Foundational reading for anyone who wants to understand where the genre Lynch works in actually came from.
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