Gen sees behind Pheris’s physical disabilities, and sets about educating and training him to realize his capabilities. Erondites was aware that Gen could be ruthless, but was less cognizant that Gen was also compassionate and smarter than he let on (in a nice parallel to the tendency of Pheris to play the role of the “idiot” so he could move around with more impunity). More than that, Erondites hoped Gen would have Pheris killed, so that he could pass the older boy’s inheritance to Pheris’s younger and more seemingly “normal” brother.

Erondites agreed to let his heir be raised in the palace – not disclosing Pheris’s birth defects – thinking he pulled one over Gen. Pheris was born speechless and physically disabled, but not mentally impaired, as so many immediately assumed (but never Gen). But one can’t help, I think, falling in love with the main characters in the series, especially Eugenides – called Gen – “the Thief” and now King of Attolia.Įach book has a different narrator – in this case it is Pheris, the heir to Baron Erondites, one of Gen’s enemies. It’s difficult to pinpoint what made me love these books so much, especially because I tended to get a bit confused by all the byzantine plotting of those wrangling for power in the stories. In any event, now readers of the previous books have a great reason to start the series all over again. After I read the first though, I was hooked, and kept on reading them. I read the first five books some years ago, and wish I had waited to read them all together. This is the sixth and final book in the Queen’s Thief fantasy series, which the author has produced over a twenty-four-year time span.

The queen's thief series