“How much more danger are my children truly in than some poor bastard conscripted to fight in his duke's wars? Or some penniless family dying of a plague with their neighborhood quarantined, or burnt to the ground? War, disease, taxes. Bowing heads and kissing boots. There's plenty of hungry damn things prowling on land, Orrin. It's just that the ones at sea tend not to wear crowns.” (Red Seas under Red Skies, p. 374)

Scott Lynch's first two novels are definitely low rather than high fantasy: Most of their action takes place in cities with corrupt and authoritarian rulers, and their heroes are a pair of clever rogues living by their wits, in the style of classic picaresque heroes. Lynch's world is one where Machiavelli's political theories would come across not as cynical, but as ordinary common sense.

The first novel shows a crisis in the career of Locke Lamora, a brilliant confidence man, when his latest scam gets him into the middle of a power struggle in his native city's underworld. The second takes him to a new city, where the power struggle is between factions in the officially recognized government; and in trying to survive his own schemes, Lamora gets sent to sea to deal with pirates.

This is the point where the story takes on a hint of libertarian interest. One of the ironies of history is that republics, democracies, and anarchies have often been associated with piracy and brigandage. The pirate ships of the Spanish Main, for example, were organized as partnerships with contractually assigned shares, where policy was subject to debate; the captain's authority in battle was absolute, but as soon as the fight ended, so did his power, like that of an ancient Roman dictator, who served only for the duration of a war. Lynch shows the operation of a pirate ship and a pirate freeport set up on similar lines.

Fans of Robert Heinlein will also likely enjoy the story of Locke's childhood in the first novel, as his mentor trains him in the higher forms of thievery and some unexpected skills associated with it, in somewhat the fashion of Baslim the Cripple training Thorby in Citizen of the Galaxy. It seems unlikely that real thieves ever get taught to practice theft as a high art in quite this fashion, but it would certainly be more interesting if they did.

Primarily, though, these are stories of adventure. They have ingenious tricks and deceptions, mystery and suspense and physical danger. They have some of the most vivid scenes of hand to hand combat I've read. Lynch never loses sight of the need to entertain the reader, and he does it with impressive skill. And his world may not be one that most of us would want to live in, but it's almost ideally suited to provide a setting for adventures. The classical definition of adventure is “Somebody else having a really rough time comfortably far away”; it's hard to imagine a story that would fit it better.