Books like The Lies of Locke Lamora
What should you read after Scott Lynch’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Scott Lynch
- 2006
- Fantasy heist
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Lies of Locke Lamora
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchShadow and Bone
Leigh Bardugo
Bardugo's Ravka is the nearest thing to Camorr on this list: a country of hustlers, patrons and orphans where a poor kid survives on nerve and a good lie.
- A city built on alien glass
- Flashbacks to the training
- Thieves with their own laws
- YA romance takes the wheel
Great matchThe Name of the Wind
Patrick Rothfuss
For the flashback architecture and the pleasure of watching a clever poor boy learn a trade. Rothfuss lingers where Lynch cuts, but the swagger is identical.
- Flashbacks to the training
- Profanity and swagger
- An elaborate long con
- Series unfinished; book three unwritten
Best for the training flashbacksNevernight
Jay Kristoff
An assassin school told with footnotes and enormous relish — the same delight in a narrator who will not stop showing off, plus a considerable body count.
- Flashbacks to the training
- Profanity and swagger
- Plans that fall apart violently
- Explicit sex and gore
Great matchThe Bone Season
Samantha Shannon
A criminal underworld with its own hierarchy and its own slang, run out of a not-quite-London by people who treat organised crime as a respectable profession.
- Thieves with their own laws
- A city built on alien glass
- Dystopian SF machinery
Great matchVicious
V.E. Schwab
Schwab's structure is Lynch's structure: present-day revenge intercut with the friendship that caused it, each half closing in on the other.
- Flashbacks to the training
- An elaborate long con
- Brotherhood, not romance
- Superpowers, modern setting
Worth a look — with a warningThe Poppy War
R. F. Kuang
Starts as a scrappy underdog-at-school story with jokes in it and then turns into something considerably worse. Go in knowing the third act is an atrocity.
- Plans that fall apart violently
- Flashbacks to the training
- Graphic atrocity in part three
Best for the crewSix of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
Six criminals, one impossible job, and a plan that survives contact with reality for roughly ten pages. If it was the heist and the banter, start here.
- An elaborate long con
- A crew that banters
- Plans that fall apart violently
- YA, with paired-off romances
Worth a look — with a warningThe Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
Shares only the sense of a city-sized invention you can walk around inside. Everything Lynch does with plot, Morgenstern does with atmosphere instead.
- A city built on alien glass
- An elaborate long con
- Almost no plot momentum
Great matchUprooted
Naomi Novik
For the apprenticeship half of Locke's story: a girl taken on by a difficult master and taught a craft that turns out to be all that stands between her village and ruin.
- Flashbacks to the training
- Brotherhood, not romance
- Fairy-tale register, rural setting
Great matchNeverwhere
Neil Gaiman
An underworld with its own courts, markets and etiquette, and two villains far too polite about the harm they do. Camorr's institutional weirdness, London-flavoured.
- Thieves with their own laws
- A city built on alien glass
- Profanity and swagger
- Whimsical rather than brutal
Great matchA Darker Shade of Magic
V.E. Schwab
A smuggler with a very good coat, a thief who talks too much, and a partnership that stays a partnership. Lighter than Lynch and similarly moreish.
- Brotherhood, not romance
- A crew that banters
- Thieves with their own laws
- Less profanity, softer edges
Worth a look — with a warningThe Magicians
Lev Grossman
Clever people who learn a difficult skill and discover it has not made them good, told with a cynicism Lynch usually reserves for his villains.
- Flashbacks to the training
- Plans that fall apart violently
- Protagonists are hard to like
Great matchRed Sister
Mark Lawrence
A convent that trains assassins, a girl with nothing, and friendships forged under instruction — the Gentlemen Bastards origin story, with more knives and fewer jokes.
- Flashbacks to the training
- Brotherhood, not romance
- Plans that fall apart violently
- Humourless by comparison
What should you read after The Lies of Locke Lamora?
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo — bardugo's Ravka is the nearest thing to Camorr on this list: a country of hustlers, patrons and orphans where a poor kid survives on nerve and a good lie.
If what stayed with you was flashbacks to the training, read The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss instead: for the flashback architecture and the pleasure of watching a clever poor boy learn a trade. Rothfuss lingers where Lynch cuts, but the swagger is identical. Nevernight by Jay Kristoff is the other strong option — an assassin school told with footnotes and enormous relish — the same delight in a narrator who will not stop showing off, plus a considerable body count.
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