Start with The Lies of Locke Lamora, and read the three books in publication order. There is no ambiguity about the order. There is a much bigger thing to settle first.
Scott Lynch planned seven Gentleman Bastard books. Three exist. The Republic of Thieves was published in 2013 and the fourth, long announced as The Thorn of Emberlain, has not appeared. That is more than a decade of waiting with no publication date, and anyone starting the series should start it knowing the story is unfinished and may stay that way. Decide before page one whether you are willing to read an unfinished series; it is the honest question and the answer is personal.
It is not a reason to avoid it. Each of the three books resolves its own con, so you get three complete heists rather than three fragments. But the larger arc set up in book one is unresolved, and one very large question raised at the end of book three is left hanging.
The three published books
The Lies of Locke Lamora is structurally the best of the three: a present-day confidence trick in the canal city of Camorr, intercut with flashbacks to the childhood training that made the con possible. The two timelines converge exactly when they should, so do not skim the flashback chapters — that is where the plotting is actually done.
The tone is the selling point: dense profane banter, elaborate schemes, and a warm found-family crew. It is also, without warning, extremely brutal. The book turns much darker than its first two hundred pages suggest, and people you like die badly. Camorr itself sits on the ruins of an unexplained precursor civilisation whose indestructible Elderglass towers nobody can cut or move. Lynch never explains it, and the refusal is one of the better decisions in the book.
Red Seas Under Red Skies moves to a casino city and then to sea, and is the most uneven of the three — the pirate section is enormously enjoyable and does not quite fit the book it is in. The Republic of Thieves finally delivers Sabetha, referenced constantly for two books, and splits its time between a rigged election and a flashback to a theatre company. Readers divide on whether she was worth the wait.
The ancestors
With no fourth book coming, the most useful move is backward, to the two pulp writers Lynch is openly writing out of.
Swords and Deviltry is the first volume by internal chronology of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sequence, and contains both origin stories plus Ill Met in Lankhmar, which won the Hugo and the Nebula. The two-thieves-with-banter mode is Leiber's invention, not Lynch's: Fafhrd and the Mouser are the direct ancestors of Locke and Jean, and Lankhmar is the direct ancestor of Camorr. Ill Met in Lankhmar also starts as a caper and ends somewhere very cold, which will feel extremely familiar after book one.
Tales of the Dying Earth is a seven-hundred-page omnibus collecting four Jack Vance books; the relevant ones are the Cugel books, in which a thoroughly selfish rogue schemes his way across a dying far-future Earth. Vance's contribution is diction — the formal, ornate, ironic speech everyone in Lynch uses when being clever comes from here. Read one constituent book at a time with breaks rather than treating it as a novel.
What to read while you wait
Six of Crows is the closest structural match: a six-person crew, an impossible prison break, rotating viewpoints and a plan that keeps folding back on itself. It is marketed as young adult, which puts some readers off unnecessarily; the plotting is tighter than Lynch's, and crucially it is a duology and it is finished.
The Blade Itself supplies the voice rather than the heist — cynical, very funny, and structurally a long setup. Be warned that this first book is almost entirely characters arriving, and the payoff is in the two that follow. Those are finished.
The Name of the Wind is the other obvious recommendation, and honesty requires the same warning as for Lynch: it is the first book of a trilogy whose third volume has not appeared, and the wait has been even longer. Go in knowing that.
One catalogue note: the Sanderson record here, Brandon Sanderson's Fantasy Firsts, is a multi-novel sampler bundle collecting the opening books of several of his series rather than a single novel. The one you want out of it is Mistborn: The Final Empire, which is literally a heist novel — a crew, a mark, a con against an immortal emperor — and the Mistborn trilogy is finished, which in this context is the entire point.
Browse more fantasy reading paths on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: Gentleman Bastard Reading Order and Guide.
