Crooked Kingdom

The Dregs at Their Best

Crooked Kingdom is the novel that confirmed Leigh Bardugo as one of the most gifted ensemble writers in contemporary fantasy. Where Six of Crows had to build the crew from the ground up — establish each character’s wound, competence, and voice — the sequel inherits all of that groundwork and can use it without restraint.

The plot picks up immediately after the Ice Court heist, with the Dregs back in Ketterdam and thoroughly betrayed: Inej has been taken, their payment is forfeit, and Jan Van Eck has the resources of the Merchant Council behind him. Kaz’s response is not a single heist but a sustained campaign — a series of overlapping cons, each designed to trigger the next, aimed at dismantling Van Eck’s power while extracting maximum personal and financial restitution.

Kaz Brekker’s Architecture

The novel’s formal pleasure is watching Bardugo reveal what Kaz has planned in layers. Readers (and characters) think they understand what Kaz is doing, and then discover they understood a subplot. The actual plan is several levels deeper. This is the heist novel as its own subgenre operating at full capacity: the reader’s pleasure comes from the retrospective click of seeing how everything was always prepared.

What distinguishes Bardugo’s approach is that the planning never feels dishonest to the characters. Kaz is not omniscient — he adapts, occasionally fails, and the emotional consequences of his maneuvering are real. He uses people as instruments, and the novel is clear-eyed about what this costs him.

The Ensemble at Full Depth

Each of the six members of the crew receives arc completion that is consistent with their established characterization while moving them genuinely forward. Wylan’s confrontation with his father. Jesper’s reconciliation with his own history of self-destruction. Nina’s grief over what parem has cost her and what it has given her in exchange. And Matthias, whose arc ends in the most devastating way the story could have chosen — suddenly, at the moment his character transformation was most complete.

Kaz and Inej

The novel’s slow-burn emotional center — Kaz Brekker and Inej Ghafa, two people whose respective traumas make physical touch nearly impossible — is resolved with a restraint that is more affecting than any conventional romance climax. Their final scene is a conversation about futures and a daring single physical contact. Bardugo understands that what these two characters need to say to each other matters far more than anything they could do.

Our rating: 4.6/5 — A sequel that genuinely improves on an excellent first novel, delivering one of fantasy’s finest ensemble resolutions with intelligence, emotional honesty, and plotting precision.

Reading Guides

• Leigh Bardugo Books in Order: Complete Grishaverse Reading Guide (2026)

The Architecture of Kaz’s Plan

Crooked Kingdom is, among other things, a masterclass in how to write a heist sequel that exceeds its predecessor. Where Six of Crows had a single target — get in and out of the Ice Court — the sequel is a sustained multi-front campaign across Ketterdam, with Kaz running several simultaneous operations that are individually comprehensible but collectively designed to trigger a larger outcome the reader cannot see until Bardugo chooses to reveal it.

The pleasure of reading this is retrospective: you think you understand what Kaz is doing, then discover you understood a subplot. The actual plan is several levels deeper, and its execution depends on pieces that Bardugo planted chapters earlier. The fair-play misdirection — information present but pointed elsewhere — is handled with the precision of a locked-room mystery writer who has thought through every reader’s line of sight.

What distinguishes this from mere plotting cleverness is that the plan is always consistent with character. Kaz is not omniscient; he adapts when things go wrong; and the emotional consequences of using people as instruments — including the people he cares about — are tracked with honesty. The novel’s formal satisfaction and its emotional honesty reinforce each other rather than competing.

Matthias: The Cost of Change

The most devastating choice Bardugo makes in Crooked Kingdom involves Matthias Helvar. His arc across the duology is one of its most carefully constructed: the Fjerdan drüskelle trained to hate and capture Grisha, forced into proximity with Nina, slowly educated out of everything he was taught to believe by the evidence of actual people in front of him. By the end of this novel, Matthias has become the character the beginning of Six of Crows suggested he might never be.

The timing of what happens to him is the cruelest element. His death arrives precisely when his transformation is most complete — when the reader has finally trusted that the arc will reach its conclusion. Bardugo is using the sequence to make a point about the relationship between personal growth and historical circumstance: people change, and the world does not pause to acknowledge it.

Nina’s grief, which runs through the final section of the novel, is handled with appropriate magnitude. The compression that some readers note — her mourning arc takes fewer pages than its emotional weight seems to require — is a real limitation, but it does not diminish the devastation of the sequence itself.

Wylan and Jesper: The Lighter Thread

If the Kaz/Inej and Nina/Matthias storylines carry the book’s emotional weight, Wylan and Jesper provide its counterbalance. Their relationship develops from mutual attraction toward something more honest — Jesper’s addiction and the self-destructiveness it represents, and Wylan’s complicated relationship with his father, are both given the space they need — and the resolution of their storyline lands with genuine warmth. Bardugo understands that a novel built entirely on devastation needs somewhere for its readers to breathe.

Wylan’s confrontation with Jan Van Eck — and the revelation of what his father did and why — is one of the book’s most satisfying sequences. It connects personal history to the larger stakes of the con in a way that serves both plot and character simultaneously.

Jan Van Eck as Antagonist

The villain of Crooked Kingdom is not a supernatural threat but a wealthy man with institutional power, which turns out to be more than sufficient. Jan Van Eck’s ability to hide his criminality behind Merchant Council respectability, to deploy the mechanisms of legitimate commerce against people who cannot access those mechanisms, gives the novel its political texture. Kaz’s campaign against him is partly personal and partly the satisfaction of watching someone who has always relied on institutional protection discover that those protections have limits.

What the Duology Achieves

The Six of Crows duology accomplished something rare: a sequel that genuinely improves on an already excellent first novel. The cast, the world, and the plotting were all in place; Crooked Kingdom uses them without restraint, delivering on every promise the first book made and several it did not make explicitly. For readers who fell in love with the Dregs, this is exactly the ending they deserved.