Why You'll Love This
Kaz Brekker doesn't get revenge — he gets interest, and watching him dismantle his enemies like a chess grandmaster is one of fantasy's great pleasures.
- Great if you want: ensemble heist fiction where every character earns their moment
- The experience: tense and propulsive — the plot tightens like a noose
- The writing: Bardugo structures reveals with a con artist's timing and precision
- Skip if: you haven't read Six of Crows — this picks up immediately after
About This Book
When you've been betrayed, outgunned, and left with nothing but your wits and a crew that barely trusts each other, what do you do? You scheme harder. Crooked Kingdom picks up with Kaz Brekker and his ragged band of criminals at their most desperate — stripped of leverage, hunted by enemies on multiple fronts, and facing stakes that stretch far beyond the canals of Ketterdam. This is a story about what people fight for when survival isn't enough, and whether loyalty forged in desperation can hold when everything is on the line.
What makes this book such a rewarding read is Bardugo's structural confidence — she juggles six distinct, deeply flawed characters without losing a single thread, letting each voice breathe while building toward something genuinely surprising. Her prose is sharp and cinematic, but it's the small moments — a glance, a confession, a calculated cruelty — that hit hardest. The plot delivers the elaborate schemes readers loved in Six of Crows, but Crooked Kingdom earns its emotional weight honestly, turning genre mechanics into something that actually aches.
