The one time you won’t mind paying the Piper
Synopsis
BLOOD BOUND AND PENNILESS. EXILED INTO CURSED LANDS. HUNTED BY DEATH.
When the thief Suri suffers a humiliating robbery, she has one day to pay off an ugly debt. Her solution: abduct and impersonate a foreign princess at the royal ball. But the wickedly handsome fae lord of the wasteland, Kol, has gatecrashed the party to find the princess she’s pretending to be. And worse, his bodyguards are the same ones who robbed her the night before.
With Suri’s knife lodged in Kol’s right-hand man, stolen trinkets in her pockets, and now her kidnapped princess missing, she can’t outrun the law. The King exiles her with one condition: assassinate Kol, and all is forgiven. But Kol has promised his own brutal revenge against her—if his wastelands don’t kill her first.
Review
If I told you this was a tale of a permanently angry and put-upon thief attempting to get their revenge and riches in a grim world of dangerous magic, secret histories and backstabbing political power players, you would probably nod and say “I’ve heard this before”, as the fantasy thief genre is one that has, like the magical rare mineral Amefyre this series is named after, been much mined, the hallmark of course being The Lies of Lock Lamora and all that have followed being judged off that mighty beast.
But Sandpiper’s voraciously entertaining and addictive debut is, I am pleased to confirm, very much its own thing (though Carissa Broadbent fans will find much that is familiar). A Pocket of Lies has two tricks in its quirky armoury: first, the ability to do all the basics well – plot, character, worldbuilding, pace, Sandpiper nails it all with an assuredness unusual for a debut. Second, its insistence on being laudably unconventional.
Take the main character, Suri. Suri is a thief who must rustle up some money to pay off her gang and save her brother, and in the process she kidnaps a princess. Inevitably this goes wrong and she’s exiled from her kingdom, and she sets off on a quest to get her revenge on those who wronged her, a quest that will see her work her way around the kingdoms of Peregrinus, a land ruled by a quirky mixture of fae royals, a pagan death lord and elemental-powered nobles.
Now the above is not a great summary as frankly the plot is much more complicated (in the best way). But the key point is that Suri is a whirlwind protagonist who deserves a hurricane named after her. Her anger at the way life has panned out and everyone has treated her is unrelenting; Sandpiper is unwilling to soften the edges, and Suri powers her way through every interaction with a new villain or royalty with a potent mixture of deception, fury and guile and occasionally toxic seduction which never lets up. She’s a gale-force ten character, one of the most memorable I’ve read this year, and her refusal to let up the barriers around her should eventually become annoying but thanks to Sandpiper’s powerful use of character interiority, we are always in her corner despite her corner being full of landmines and acid.
The second unconventional thing is the slow burn romance at the heart of this debut, which is so slow burn that you can’t see the embers and is perhaps more accurately described as dead burn, or maybe hate burn. Essentially, the handsome, charismatic lord of death Suri seeks to get her revenge over who rules over a desert wasteland is also, in theory, enamored with her, or at least not yet wanting to kill her. This non-romance only takes place over several scenes, where some excellent use of dialogue quickly makes the reader obsessed with this will-they-won’t-they-maybe-in-a-hundred-years-when-she-stops-hating-him romance, which is a refreshing change from the relentless speed of most enemies to lovers plots.
What makes it work in particular is the sheer grimness of this book – from the cover you might think it a fun fantasy with a bit of romance but by Christ you’d be wrong. Suri literally has no friends, no allies, no scenes of warmth with any characters; this is verging on grimdark; at the very least grimdark lite. Our thief must bounce around for most of the book being hurt or manipulated and trying to hurt or manipulate in return, so when you get a slight hint of someone who has (twisted) faith in her in the form of the demon lord, you cling to this like a dying man clinging to a last-minute miracle cure. Sandpiper is making you wait for your traditional romance hit, but in the waiting lies the fun.
I should finally note the pace of this book, which is faster than a cheetah that’s evolved to use rocket fuel (don’t overthink that, Darwin fans). Suri bounces round political opponents and Machiavellian queens and fights to the death like a rage-filled pinball machine, and it’s electrifyingly fun. Yet while modern-day fantasy books that are this fast tend to skimp on the worldbuilding, here Sandpiper crafts an intriguing blend of secret world history, political games playing, and twists – helped along by an admirable use of epigraphs to seed in one key twist – and the result is a pacy book that simultaneously weaves in complicated lore.
Overall, this is a brutal, lightning paced and twisty debut that breathes more life into the fantasy thief genre than an Olympic swimmer with a third lung. I am already jonesing for the sequel.
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