The Lies of Locke Lamora recap

In the canal city of Camorr, thieves live under the Secret Peace: they may rob the common folk as they please and must never touch the nobility. Locke Lamora, raised by a fraudulent blind priest to be a confidence artist rather than a cutpurse, breaks that rule for a living, running elaborate swindles on the aristocracy with his small crew, the Gentlemen Bastards. While he works his latest mark, a masked figure called the Grey King begins murdering the crime lord Capa Barsavi's captains, and a hired sorcerer of the Bondsmagi forces Locke to serve the Grey King's scheme. The trap closes: Barsavi is destroyed, the Grey King takes the city's underworld as Capa Raza, and three of the Gentlemen Bastards are murdered along with the crew's fortune. Locke and Jean Tannen, the only survivors, take the sorcerer apart, expose Raza's plan to slaughter Camorr's nobility to the duke's secret intelligence chief, and Locke kills Raza himself. They leave the city avenged, ruined, and permanently marked by the sorcerers' guild.

Camorr is a canal city built on the indestructible glass ruins of a vanished people, ruled by a duke and his nobility above and by Capa Vencarlo Barsavi's gangs below. The two halves are joined by the Secret Peace: the underworld may rob the common folk freely so long as it never touches an aristocrat, and the watch leaves it alone in return. Locke Lamora, sold as a child to the fraudulent blind priest Father Chains and raised in the vault beneath his temple, now leads the Gentlemen Bastards - Jean Tannen, the twins Calo and Galdo Sanza, and the boy Bug. To Barsavi they are a small gang of unambitious thieves paying their tribute. In fact they break the Secret Peace as a profession, running long confidence games on the nobility and hoarding the proceeds unspent in a vault under the temple. Their current mark is Don Lorenzo Salvara, whom Locke, disguised as a northern brandy merchant, persuades to invest heavily in a venture that does not exist, and whose sharper wife Sofia has to be handled as carefully as the don himself. Interleaved chapters show the crew's childhood and Chains teaching them the trade.

Barsavi's court is in trouble. Someone calling himself the Grey King has begun murdering the capa's gang leaders one at a time, without witnesses, and Barsavi has withdrawn to his moored galleon refusing to move against an enemy he cannot find. Summoned by the capa's daughter Nazca, an old friend of Locke's from their orphanage days, Locke learns that Barsavi means her to inherit and means Locke to marry her in order to steady the succession. The Salvara game continues to pay well. Then the Grey King reaches for Locke directly: he is taken by a Bondsmage of Karthain called the Falconer, a hired sorcerer whose guild nobody dares harm, and delivered to the Grey King, who orders Locke to impersonate him at a parley with Barsavi. Refusal is not on offer: the Bondsmage's presence removes every option that involves force, and the errand will put Locke in a room between the two most dangerous men in Camorr.

The Grey King's grip tightens. Nazca Barsavi, going to negotiate on her father's behalf, is murdered and her body returned to the capa, which removes any prospect of a settlement. Locke keeps the Salvara game running while preparing to stand in front of Barsavi wearing another man's name, and Jean, the only person who knows the whole shape of it, can find no way out. At the Echo Hole, Locke goes through with the impersonation and Barsavi springs the ambush he has spent days preparing. It is Barsavi who has been played. His own bodyguards, the Berangias sisters, turn on him, his sons are killed, and the Grey King reveals himself and has the capa drowned in the same cask his daughter's body came back in. The Grey King takes Camorr's underworld for himself under the name Capa Raza. Locke is stabbed, sealed in a barrel and thrown into the bay. Jean pulls him out alive. They return to the temple and find Calo, Galdo and Bug murdered in the vault below it and the crew's entire fortune gone.

Locke, badly wounded and half destroyed by grief, is kept alive largely by Jean's stubbornness while Camorr's gangs swear to their new capa. Raza consolidates fast, buying loyalty with the money he took from the Gentlemen Bastards and dispensing favours from Barsavi's old galleon, and the city adjusts to him within days. Locke refuses to leave while the man is alive, which reduces the two of them to a plan with no crew, no money and no protection behind it. At the same time the other danger the Salvara con has stirred up comes closer: the duke's secret intelligence service, run by an officer known only as the Spider, has been hunting the thief the nobility call the Thorn of Camorr, and the trail of the brandy swindle leads to him. Locke begins improvising a way to reach a man guarded by an entire underworld and by a Bondsmage.

Locke and Jean go after Raza with the only tools they have left. Locke works his way back into the city's business under a string of borrowed identities while Jean deals with the more direct obstacles: confronting the Berangias sisters, he kills them both. The pair then take the Falconer, whose protection proves less absolute than he believed. They kill his scorpion hawk, which unhinges him, and then cut out his tongue and take his fingers so that he can never work sorcery again, leaving his guild a living man to collect and a message they will not forget. Raza's motive is now clear: he is the surviving son of a merchant family destroyed years earlier by Barsavi with the duke's tacit consent, the Berangias sisters were his sisters, and every killing since has been payment against that debt. It is equally clear that he does not intend to stop with Barsavi, and that Camorr's nobility are the rest of the account.

Raza's remaining plan is aimed at the aristocracy, who will all be gathered in one place for the duke's feast in the sky-tower of Raven's Reach. Locke, caught by the duke's secret service before he can move, discovers that the Spider is Dona Vorchenza, the elderly countess the whole city has been dismissing for decades. He trades what he knows for the freedom to act; the warning reaches her in time and the nobility survive the attack Raza had prepared for them. Locke then goes after Raza in person. Aboard the Floating Grave he kills him, at very nearly the cost of his own life, and Jean gets him out. Calo, Galdo, Bug and Nazca are avenged, the crew's hoarded fortune is scattered beyond recovery, and Locke and Jean are the only two left of the family Chains built.

Locke kills Capa Raza aboard the Floating Grave and survives the fight only just, with Jean carrying him out. Raza's revenge on Barsavi is complete but his second scheme fails: the attack he prepared for Camorr's assembled nobility at the duke's feast is stopped because Locke gave the warning to the Spider in time. That officer turns out to be Dona Vorchenza, the elderly countess nobody took seriously. She knows exactly who Locke is and cannot prove any of it, and she lets him go rather than pursue him. The Falconer is collected by his own guild, mutilated and out of his mind; the Bondsmagi make it plain that what was done to him will be answered in their own time and on their own schedule, so Locke and Jean leave Camorr with an enemy that outlasts the city. Calo, Galdo, Bug and Nazca Barsavi are dead, the Gentlemen Bastards' hoarded fortune is scattered, and the temple that hid them is finished as a home. Locke and Jean take ship out of Camorr as the last two of the crew Chains raised, with their skills, each other, and very little else.