Six of Crows

 Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, 465 pages.

After watching Shadow and Bone on Netflix (it's excellent, I highly recommend it), I decided it was finally time to get to the heist book (featuring many of the same characters) that had been on my tbr list for so long.I love a good heist book, so I was pretty excited.

Six of Crows takes place mostly in Ketterdam, a fantasy city inspired by historical Amsterdam. Criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker is offered a life-changingly huge job by one of the rich merchants who run the city. The only downside being that it is also impossible. A foreign scientist has developed a drug that magnifies the magical powers of grisha, allowing them to do impossible things. It is also highly addictive and completely lethal. The scientist was promised asylum in Ketterdam, but is snatched by another nation before he can get there. Now the merchant council is launching a mission to the frozen court in Fjerda, largely regarded to be impenetrable, to get him back before he is executed, and it falls to Kaz to pull together a team who can pull it off. 

This book has absolutely everything I love about heist media, and every element was exceptional. It had a twisty plot with lots of setbacks, people who are absurdly talented in a variety of fields, and bad and/or criminal people slowly coming to care about each other deeply. I also always have a lot of fun with stories where it only becomes apparent as things go along how much was part of the master plan the whole time, and the shifting perspectives in this book really heightened that effect. The shifting perspectives also made it hard to put this book down between chapters, so I definitely ended up staying up too late to read. This is exactly my type of book, and I enjoyed it so much that I immediately picked up the second one.