Six of Crows

Six of Crows, a fantasy novel by the American author Leigh Bardugo, appeared in 2015 from Henry Holt and Co. It is set mainly in Ketterdam, a city loosely inspired by Amsterdam during the Dutch Republic, and it is part of Bardugo's Grishaverse. It opens a duology that Crooked Kingdom finished in 2016.

Kaz Brekker runs the Dregs in Ketterdam, a city where everything is for sale, and he has a reputation for doing the jobs nobody else will at a price nobody else can. A merchant offers him a fortune to break a scientist out of the most secure prison in the world, which is why Kaz takes it. The scientist has developed a drug called jurda parem that transforms the abilities of Grisha, and the opening of the book shows a test of it going badly wrong.

He picks a crew of six that includes a spy, a sharpshooter, a convict with a grudge, a Grisha healer and a runaway, and none of them trusts any of the others. The target is held in the Ice Court, on an island that no thief has ever robbed, and the plan requires them to pass as people they are not for the length of the trip. The plot is told from the third-person viewpoints of five of them.

The duology continues in Crooked Kingdom, and a further novella set after it was published later. The first book establishes Ketterdam, the crew and the heist, and it is written so that each of the six is given a reason to be there that the others do not know about.