Posted by It had been many, many moons since I last read this book (2019), and so I decided that warranted a re-read, so I could place this book within the Champions’ League. I had forgotten how much fun this book was and thoroughly enjoyed myself during my revisit to this world and these characters.
As the title suggests, this book has a main character who is a thief. The book opens with her being visited by a friend, a coworker of sorts, but he’s in a bad way and is hoping that she’ll hang on to a few things if his business ties end up hurting or killing him. Lo and behold, she ends up with a dog she didn’t want and this statue that cost her friend his life. He ends up broken, battered, and dead in an alley next to his house, and she’s trying to find out why someone wanted to kill him for this weird frog statue.
Things get worse when the detective of the city decides that she’s the main suspect. Her friend told her if he didn’t show up by midnight that something had happened to him… and so when he didn’t show up, she went looking and she ended up finding his body after he had been murdered just a short time earlier. The detective is a mage, and he casts a spell on her so he can watch her every movement, and since she’s a thief, this will be problematic. She goes to another mage for help, the only one she thinks she can trust, but she’s still wary about it. As she puts it, “Mages don’t think about right and wrong, just possible vs impossible,” but for whatever reason, he’s happy to oblige, and he also wants to take the dog off her hands since he’s lonely. With his assistance, Amra has to find a way to clear her name, find out who really killed her friend, and stay alive while she finds out what’s so valuable about this stupid frog statue.
I really liked the world-building; there was a lot packed into just 209 pages (according to Goodreads), and that’s difficult to do while also building a plot line and characters. There are different sorts of magic and magic users in this world, and there’s a line about bloodwitches and how, “people don’t invite them to parties since they talk to the dead, know the future, and might turn your blood to rust.” I really want a POV of a bloodwitch in this world who just wants someone to come join her for tea and biscuits because she’s a cinnamon roll of a person and would never turn your blood to rust. Pinky promise.
The tone for this wasn’t dark, but it wasn’t exactly light either; it was more on the adventurous/mysterious side of things. I liked the writing quite a bit as it sped you along the pages, making for an “easy read,” and I don’t mean that as an insult. I prefer to forget I’m reading and just get engrossed in the story, and that’s exactly what this delivers. This isn’t a long book, and the writing was clean and quick, so I read/listened to it in one sitting.
SPFBO RANKING:
The current ranking for this book as of 9/7/25 is 6th place, coming just after The Grey Bastards.