The Lies of Locke Lamora

May 22, 2006
Life imitates art and art scams life in Lynch's debut, a picaresque fantasy that chronicles the career of Locke Lamora—orphan, thief and leader of the Gentlemen Bastards—from the time the Thiefmaker sells Locke to the faking Eyeless Priest up to Locke's latest con of the nobility of the land of Camorr. As in any good caper novel, the plot is littered with obvious and not-so-obvious obstacles, including the secret police of Camorr's legendary Spider and the mysterious assassinations of gang leaders by the newly arrived Gray King. Locke's resilience and wit give the book the tragicomic air of a traditional picaresque, rubbery ethics and all. The villain holds the best moral justification of any of the players. Lynch provides plenty of historical and cultural information reminiscent of new weirdists Steven Erikson and China Miéville, if not quite as outré. The only drawback is that the realistic fullness of the background tends to accentuate the unreality of the melodramatic foreground.

July 15, 2006
Abandoned as an infant, the boy known as Locke Lamora grows up to become one of his citys most famous (or infamous) con artists, yet his good nature has made him a folk hero. Leading his own band of men known as the Gentlemen Bastards, Locke falls into the center of a conspiracy that threatens those he holds dear. Lynchs first novel, set in a richly detailed city peopled with a wide variety of fascinating characters, calls forth a highly motivated, determined, and sympathetic hero whose antics and knack for derring-do should appeal to fans of Steven Brusts Vlad Taltos novels. A good choice for most fantasy collections.

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2006
On a distant world, orphan Locke Lamora is sold into a crew of thieves and con artists. Soon his natural gifts make him an underworld celebrity, leader of the flamboyantly larcenous Gentleman Bandits. But there is someone who covets Locke's talents, his success, his very life, forcing him to put everything on the line to protect himself. With a world so vividly realized that it's positively tactile, and characters so richly drawn that they threaten to walk right off the page, this is one of those novels that reaches out and grabs readers, pulling us into the middle of the action. With this debut novel, Lynch immediately establishes himself as a gifted and fearless storyteller, unafraid of comparisons to Silverberg and Jordan, not to mention David Liss and even Dickens (the parallels to " Oliver Twist "offer an appealing extra dimension to the story, although the novel is no mere reimagining of that Victorian classic). Fans of lavishly appointed fantasy will be in seventh heaven here, but it will be nearly as popular with readers of literary crime fiction. This is a true genre bender, at home on almost any kind of fiction shelf. Expect it to be among the year's most impressive debuts.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)