I can haz crime?

I'm not sure what kicked this off but at some point recently I looked at my giant pile of theory to read and was like "It's DARK and COLD and I'm UNEMPLOYED and BEHIND ON SEVERAL ENJOYABLE FANTASY SERIES, I am going to try to carve out some time to catch up." Then I put in holds for a bunch of stuff at the library.

 

One of them was Leigh Bardugo's Crooked Kingdom, the sequel to her excellent YA gang fantasy Six of Crows. This one has red-edged pages where the last one had black-edged pages, so you can already tell this is very much a series in my general style.

 

In addition to the lovely binding, it is my general style content-wise, as well. We've got gritty grimdark dangerous cities, ruthless moneygrubbing and cheating, organized crime, disorganized crime, extremely psychologically fucked-up teenagers with morbid backstories, zombies, murder, more murder, attempted murder, fake murder, and other such variations on the general murder theme, elaborate schemes that go elaborately awry, double- and triple-crossing, sex, drugs, and gambling (rock and roll hasn't been invented yet in Ketterdam), and all sorts of stuff like that. It reminds me of other indulgently Dickensian adventure reads I've liked in the past few years, like the Timothy Wilde books and Foundryside. 

 

This one takes place entirely in the grotesque rathole of a trading city called Ketterdam, where the job from Book 1 has blown up in their faces a wee bit and they haven't gotten paid the outrageous sums of money they were supposed to be paid. Obviously this means it is all-out war against anyone and everyone who had a hand in that, which, unfortunately for Kaz Brekker and the gang, is quite a lot of people: the wealthy mercher Jan Van Eck, rival Barrel boss Pekka Rollins, several other sovereign nations, the list goes on. I can't really begin to explain the plot without immediately moving into massive spoilers, because there are fresh and exciting twists every few chapters that explode what you think is going on and force the characters to replace all their current insane plans with a fresh batch of insane plans. It is definitely the sort of book that makes me wish I were fiendish and clever enough to come up with plots like that, but alas, I am not.

 

While I don't know if I would call this an anticapitalist book per se, it has strong themes against not just enslavement and human trafficking--although those are certainly driving points--but also economic exploitation, the dubiously "free" nature of contracts, and rich people generally. The actual, literal religion in Kerch (the country Ketterdam is in) is some sort of mashup of Prosperity Gospel and making literal the popular economic belief that The Market is some sort of wrathful sacred god that must be appeased before all else (his name, apparently, is Ghezen). The biggest religious center in the city is literally a temple of commerce. And beneath all the pious pretensions at clean living--in this world, we're back to the Puritans' stern black coats and such, rather than today's weird obsessions with meditation retreats and only wearing one color t-shirt ever--the ruling class is just as corrupt, vicious, decadent, abusive, and dishonest as the Barrel scum they pretend to be so offended by. I think the book does a pretty good job of illustrating that all the rules are fake and the system will do anything to defend itself, and that the only real way of curbing the worst excesses is to engage in elaborate scheming and sabotage to convince some rich people that other rich people are being egregious enough to pose a threat to their own comfort. In this case it involves some multilayered spycraft and fraud involving sugar markets pulled off by a small crew of very specifically gifted individuals, rather than mass politics, but it is a fantasy adventure story and not actually a treatise on revolution, after all. 

 

...OK, so much for taking a break from theory.

 

Probably my biggest criticism of the book is that I correctly guessed who was going to die, and since I don't usually try to call character deaths before I see them, which means it was signposted pretty heavily. Every character had some sort of idea of what they wanted to do when this job was over and they were all filthy rich, so I don't remember precisely what it was about this character's that made me go "This one's definitely not gonna make it," but I was just 100% certain he wasn't going to make it and I was correct. Possibly it was too wholesome; it's that kind of book.

 

Which reminds me. In addition to a lot of action and a lot of financial fraud, there's also a lot of FEELINGS, so it's not just a robotic showcase of twisty plotting like a lot of heist books are. I am absolutely fine with heist books that have underdeveloped characters and overdeveloped heisting, but you do get a bit more richness and texture when an author manages to avoid that. Inej and Kaz's can't-be-a-romance-because-they're-both-way-too-fucked-up-for-that-sort-of-thing is nearly interesting at times. The other romances are standard level boring but no one of them dominates the story enough to be annoying, and they're fairly secondary to all the themes about family and friendship and comradeship and (checks notes) shared thirst for revenge. 

 

Anyway, while it would always be nice to have more Kaz Brekker schemes, I think this duology works quite well as a duology, especially with the lovely color-coded binding.