Books Like The Lies of Locke Lamora

The most direct heir to Locke Lamora's heist energy. Six criminals, one impossible job, everyone playing angles you don't see until they matter. YA in name only — the darkness, the reversals, and the character work are fully adult. Bardugo is openly in debt to Lynch, and it shows in the best possible way: this is the book for readers who want the same impossible-job structure with an equally memorable ensemble.

Revenge as elaborate scheme. Monza Murcatto assembles a crew to kill the seven men who betrayed her, and Abercrombie is as good as Lynch at making you feel the cost of each step. The same dark wit, the same willingness to let plans go wrong in ways that hurt, the same cast of morally compromised professionals who are better at their jobs than at being human. Darker than Locke Lamora, and the ending doesn't flinch.

Daevabad is Camorr's spiritual cousin — ancient, layered, stratified, full of people whose survival depends on knowing which rules apply to them and which don't. Djinn politics instead of thieves guilds, but the sense of a city with centuries of weight behind every street corner is identical. A con artist protagonist pulled into a world of immortal power games — the Lynch reader will feel immediately at home in the texture of this world.

Godsgrave is another city with real menace, and Kristoff's footnoted, irreverent prose style is openly modelled on Lynch's voice. An assassin school novel about a girl who trains to kill the men who destroyed her family — darker and more explicit than Locke Lamora, with the same sense of a beautifully constructed world that enjoys punishing the people who live in it. The footnotes are either charming or annoying depending on your tolerance; most Lynch readers find them charming.

Kvothe's Tarbean years have the same texture as Locke's childhood — a street kid surviving by wit and luck, shaped by a father figure who teaches him to be more than his circumstances. Rothfuss writes with the same kind of precise, witty, deeply felt prose as Lynch. The found family is smaller and the heists are replaced by university politics, but the voice and the warmth are identical. Be aware: the series is currently unfinished with no confirmed date for book three.

Found family of aging mercenaries on one last impossible job. The same warmth under the grimdark exterior, the same dark humour, the same absolute conviction that these people would die for each other — and probably will. Eames writes with obvious love for the genre and for his characters, and the result is one of the most purely enjoyable fantasy novels of the last decade. If the Gentleman Bastards' loyalty was the part that got you, this is your next read.