Scott Lynch

Scott Lynch is an American fantasy author whose debut The Lies of Locke Lamora is a gloriously inventive heist fantasy set in a Venice-like city of thieves, con artists, and dark magic.

The Lies of Locke Lamora, published in 2006, is one of the most purely enjoyable fantasy debuts of its decade. Set in the city of Camorr — a richly imagined amalgam of Renaissance Venice and a pirate port — it follows Locke Lamora and his crew of elite con artists, the Gentlemen Bastards, as they run elaborate cons on Camorr’s nobility while navigating a dangerous criminal underworld. Lynch writes with swagger, wit, and a genuine ear for clever dialogue, and the heist structure gives the plotting an unusual mechanical pleasure.

The book earns its “grown-up fantasy” designation honestly: it is violent, profane, and dark in ways that feel integral rather than gratuitous, and its flashback structure — alternating between Locke’s childhood training and the present-day heist — is handled with skill. The world-building is impressive in its specificity without ever becoming the kind of encyclopedia dump that can bog down secondary world fantasy.

The series’ subsequent volumes have been slower to arrive — Lynch has been candid about mental health challenges affecting his writing — but The Lies of Locke Lamora stands fully on its own. Fans of intelligent, witty, plot-driven fantasy will find it one of the genre’s great pleasures, and Locke Lamora himself is one of its most memorable protagonists.