Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard sequence, beginning with The Lies of Locke Lamora, did something that shouldn't have worked: it crossed a Renaissance-era Venice with Ocean's Eleven and dared you not to love it. Locke Lamora is a con artist raised from childhood by a master thief, operating in the layered criminal underworld of a city called Camorr. The books are defined by their intricate heists, their blistering dialogue (characters insult each other with the creativity of Shakespearean actors), and a world so richly constructed that you can smell the canals. But beneath the wit and the capers, Lynch writes about loyalty—the desperate, furious kind that makes you fight impossible odds for the people you love. If you've been chasing that combination of cleverness, heart, and sheer literary panache, these authors deliver.
If you enjoy reading books by Scott Lynch then you might also like the following authors:
If you love Locke Lamora, you will love Kaz Brekker. Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows assembles a crew of six teenage criminals—a scheming mastermind, a sharpshooter, a spy, a demolitions expert, a wraith, and a runaway—to pull off an impossible heist at the most heavily guarded fortress in the world. The parallels to Lynch are so precise that the books feel like they're in direct conversation: the elaborate con, the gang of misfits who are family by choice, the flashbacks that reveal how each member was forged by pain.
What Bardugo adds is a tighter emotional focus. Where Lynch sprawls, Bardugo compresses—each character's backstory is a blade, and every relationship carries the tension of people who've never had the luxury of trusting anyone. The heist planning is intricate, the double-crosses are genuinely surprising, and the ending lands like a punch. This is the single closest match to Lynch in all of fantasy, and it's not close.
Joe Abercrombie writes fantasy that assumes everyone is lying about something. The Blade Itself introduces three protagonists who are each, in their own way, magnificent frauds: a barbarian who is more thoughtful than he lets on, a crippled torturer who is more monstrous than he admits, and a vain nobleman who is far less heroic than he believes. The novel unfolds through sharp dialogue, moral ambiguity, and a dark humor that will feel instantly familiar to Lynch fans.
Where Lynch writes about loyalty between thieves, Abercrombie writes about the absence of loyalty—the way people use, betray, and manipulate each other while insisting they're the hero of their own story. His later trilogy, The Age of Madness, evolves this into full-scale political satire. Abercrombie doesn't offer the warmth of Lynch's found family, but he matches the wit, the moral complexity, and the sense that nothing in this world is what it first appears to be.
Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind shares Lynch's most distinctive quality: a protagonist who is brilliant and knows it. Kvothe, like Locke, is a prodigy who survives on wit, performance, and an almost reckless confidence in his own cleverness. He talks his way into a university he can't afford, outmaneuvers professors twice his age, and narrates his own legend with the self-aware charm of a man who has always been the smartest person in the room.
The connection between Rothfuss and Lynch is in the voice. Both authors write first-person-adjacent narratives where the hero's personality saturates every sentence—the humor, the swagger, the occasional crack in the armor that reveals genuine vulnerability underneath. Rothfuss's prose is more lyrical than Lynch's (some passages read like poetry), but the spirit is the same: stories about extraordinary people told with extraordinary style. A warning: the trilogy remains unfinished.
Douglas Hulick's Among Thieves is the most directly comparable book to The Lies of Locke Lamora on this list. Drothe is a "Nose"—an information broker and low-level operator in the criminal underworld of a sprawling city—who stumbles onto a relic that every faction in the empire wants. What follows is a breakneck chase through the hierarchy of organized crime, with Drothe fast-talking, double-crossing, and barely surviving his way through every chapter.
Hulick writes with the gritty immediacy of a crime thriller. His underworld is detailed and convincing—the slang, the hierarchies, the codes of honor among thieves all feel lived-in—and Drothe shares Locke's gift for getting into catastrophic trouble and improvising his way out. If Lynch gave you a taste for fantasy noir and you want more, Hulick delivers the goods with zero filler and maximum velocity.
Fonda Lee's Jade City is The Godfather rewritten as an Asian-inspired fantasy, and it's every bit as good as that sounds. On the island of Kekon, two rival clans of jade-powered warriors fight for control of the trade in magical jade—a substance that grants superhuman abilities but slowly destroys those who wear too much of it. The Kaul family, who lead one of the clans, are a dysfunctional, fiercely loyal group bound by blood, duty, and a capacity for devastating violence.
Lee shares Lynch's talent for building a world that feels like a fully functioning society rather than a backdrop for adventure. Her city of Janloon has its own economy, politics, fashion, and cuisine, all rendered with the specificity that makes Camorr so memorable. But the deepest connection is thematic: like Lynch, Lee writes about families forged by crime, the obligations that come with power, and the terrible things people do for the people they love. This is world-class fantasy fiction.
Chris Wooding's Retribution Falls is the book for Lynch fans who want their criminal crew airborne. Captain Darian Frey is a smuggler, a cheat, and the skipper of a battered aircraft called the Ketty Jay. His crew is a disaster: a drunken navigator, a disgraced aristocrat, a feral cat-woman, and a daemonist whose demon might be smarter than he is. When a seemingly routine job goes catastrophically wrong, they're framed for mass murder and must clear their names while the entire nation hunts them.
Wooding captures Lynch's spirit better than almost anyone. His crew's bickering has the same affectionate venom as the Gentleman Bastards, his plotting is a series of plans that go wrong in increasingly spectacular ways, and the tone is a perfect balance between genuine danger and laugh-out-loud humor. The Tales of the Ketty Jay is a four-book series, and it gets better with every installment as the crew's bonds deepen. Criminally underread.
Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Final Empire is structured as a heist novel: a crew of thieves with magical abilities plans to overthrow an immortal tyrant who has ruled for a thousand years. The magic system—Allomancy, which allows users to "burn" ingested metals for different powers—is the most cleverly designed in modern fantasy, and the heist plotting unfolds with the layered precision of a great con.
Sanderson is a different writer than Lynch—more methodical, less pyrotechnic in his prose—but the structural DNA is remarkably similar. Both build their plots around elaborate schemes with multiple moving parts, both love the moment when the plan comes together (or spectacularly doesn't), and both create protagonists who must be smarter than everyone else in the room to survive. Sanderson also shares Lynch's commitment to the found-family dynamic: the crew of Mistborn is a group of damaged, brilliant misfits whose loyalty to each other is the real magic of the series.
K.J. Parker writes fantasy for people who think everyone in the genre is too earnest. Under this pseudonym (now revealed to be Tom Holt), Parker crafts stories about intelligent, morally compromised people executing elaborate schemes that spiral out of control with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. The Folding Knife follows Basso, a banker whose financial genius propels him to become the leader of a republic—and whose one fatal blind spot slowly destroys everything he's built.
Parker shares Lynch's love of competence. His protagonists are engineers, accountants, fencers, and forgers—people whose expertise is described with such loving detail that you learn something from every book. The humor is drier than Lynch's (bone-dry, in fact), the worldbuilding is drawn from Roman and Byzantine history rather than Renaissance Italy, and the philosophical undercurrent is darker. But if what you love about Lynch is the pleasure of watching a clever person think their way through an impossible problem, Parker is the purest distillation of that pleasure in fantasy.
Daniel Abraham's The Dragon's Path, the first book of The Dagger and the Coin, is a masterful political fantasy driven by characters rather than battles. The most Lynch-like character is Marcus Wester, a legendary mercenary captain trying to live a quiet life, whose dry wit and tactical brilliance make him feel like an older, more tired version of Locke Lamora. Alongside him, a young banker named Cithrin discovers that financial manipulation can be as powerful as any sword.
Abraham's great strength is patience. His plots build slowly and organically, with the complexity of real political history, and his dialogue has a natural, almost conversational quality that makes his characters feel like real people making terrible decisions for understandable reasons. He co-created The Expanse with Ty Franck, and the same instinct for character-driven plotting in a richly built world is on full display here. For Lynch fans who want their fantasy with more political intrigue and less flash.
Mark Lawrence's Prince of Thorns opens with a fourteen-year-old prince leading a band of murderous outlaws through a scorched, post-apocalyptic landscape. Jorg Ancrath is one of the most unsettling protagonists in fantasy—brilliant, magnetic, and horrifyingly amoral—and the novel dares you to keep reading despite your revulsion. You will, because Lawrence writes with the compulsive energy of a thriller and the dark wit of a writer who finds human monstrousness genuinely interesting.
Lawrence is darker than Lynch—significantly darker—but the connection is in the voice and the cleverness. Like Locke, Jorg survives by being smarter and more ruthless than everyone around him, and his internal monologue crackles with the same sardonic intelligence. Lawrence's later work, particularly the Book of the Ancestor trilogy starting with Red Sister, shifts to a female protagonist and a convent-as-assassin-school setting that may actually be his masterpiece. Either series rewards Lynch fans who want their fantasy with a sharper edge.
Sam Sykes's Seven Blades in Black reads like the script of an action movie written by someone with a literature degree and a grudge. Sal the Cacophony, a disgraced mage, is on a quest to track down the seven people who ruined her life, armed with a magic gun, a list of names, and a seemingly bottomless well of sarcasm. The novel blazes through double-crosses, duels, and desperate escapes at a pace that never lets up.
Sykes matches Lynch's energy better than almost anyone on this list. His dialogue is ferocious—every conversation is a duel—and his protagonist shares Locke's combination of strategic brilliance and spectacular emotional damage. Where Lynch builds elaborate heists, Sykes builds elaborate revenge arcs, but the pleasure is the same: watching a character who is too clever for their own good navigate a world that wants them dead, armed with nothing but their wits and an unyielding refusal to quit.
Josiah Bancroft's Senlin Ascends begins with one of the most memorable openings in recent fantasy: Thomas Senlin, a mild-mannered schoolteacher on his honeymoon, loses his wife in the crowd at the base of the Tower of Babel. His quest to find her takes him upward through the Tower's ringdoms—each a self-contained world with its own culture, economy, and dangers—and transforms him from a passive, bookish man into something far more resourceful and morally ambiguous.
Bancroft's Tower of Babel is as imaginatively rich as Lynch's Camorr—a setting so vivid and strange that it becomes a character in its own right. The writing is elegant and surprising, with a dry wit that blooms gradually as Senlin's desperation strips away his propriety. The connection to Lynch is in the inventiveness of the world and the pleasure of watching an intelligent person adapt to impossible circumstances. Bancroft also shares Lynch's willingness to let his protagonist fail, learn, and become someone he never expected to be.
Brent Weeks' The Way of Shadows follows Azoth, a street orphan who apprentices himself to Durzo Blint, the deadliest assassin in the city. The novel combines a gritty urban underworld with a magic system built around illusion and deception, and the mentor-student relationship between Azoth and Durzo—tense, violent, and unexpectedly tender—gives the book an emotional backbone that lifts it above its bloody surface.
Weeks connects to Lynch through setting and tone. His city of Cenaria is as layered and dangerous as Camorr, with criminal guilds, political corruption, and a hierarchy of violence that governs everything. The plotting is twisty, the action is relentless, and Weeks shares Lynch's love of characters who operate in the shadows between law and crime. His later series, Lightbringer, moves into more epic territory with a brilliantly inventive color-based magic system, but the Night Angel Trilogy remains his most Lynch-adjacent work.
Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice is a different animal from Lynch's swashbuckling capers—quieter, more introspective, more devastating. FitzChivalry Farseer is trained as a royal assassin, navigating court politics that are as lethal as any street fight in Camorr. Where Locke performs for an audience, Fitz operates in silence, and the emotional toll of his double life accumulates with a weight that is almost unbearable by the trilogy's end.
The connection to Lynch is subtler but profound. Both authors write about characters who build identities from nothing—Locke was a nameless orphan reinvented by Father Chains, Fitz is a bastard reinvented by the crown. Both explore the cost of deception, the loneliness of living behind a mask, and the fierce, desperate love that exists between people who are loyal to each other in a world that rewards betrayal. Hobb will break your heart more thoroughly than Lynch does, but the beating heart beneath both series is the same.
China Miéville's Perdido Street Station creates a city—New Crobuzon—that is one of the most extraordinary settings in all of fantasy. A Victorian-industrial metropolis teeming with alien species, forbidden science, and rogue magic, it makes Camorr look restrained. The novel follows Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, a renegade scientist, as a seemingly innocent commission unleashes a nightmare on the city, forcing an unlikely alliance of criminals, artists, and revolutionaries to fight for their survival.
Miéville's connection to Lynch is in the worldbuilding and the love of a living, breathing city. Both authors construct urban settings with the depth and detail of a social novel, where every neighborhood has its own culture, every street has its own story, and the city itself is the most important character. Miéville's prose is denser and more experimental than Lynch's, his politics more overt, and his imagination frankly wilder. But if what you love most about Lynch is the feeling of being dropped into a fully realized city and told to fend for yourself, Miéville's New Crobuzon is the deepest dive you'll ever take.
