Format: Hardcover, 400 pages
Release Date: July 1, 2025
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Source: Publisher
Genre: Young Adult / Fantasy / Romance
Lola St. James is the world’s best kept secret. When her father’s loss in the Liar’s Dice Tournament–a high-stakes competition where players are forced to gamble with their deepest secrets–made her a target, she was rescued by the Thief, the notorious leader of the Tentacles. But the Thief’s kindness came with a price: Lola’s heart. In the years that followed, she and the Thief formed a bond like no other, able to feel each other’s emotions because of their shared heart.
Now, living under the pseudonym Astra, she is determined to prove herself and become a full-fledged Tentacle. But when a critical heist goes sideways, the only way forward is for Lola to compete in the Liar’s Dice Tournament herself. Lola is confident in her ability to pull off any heist, but the Thief's mysterious brother, the Liar, runs the game and he turns out to be more than she bargained for. As her attraction for him grows and illusions run wild, she will be forced to confront the secrets of her past, the truth of the brothers’ shared history, and the lies she tells herself.
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Now, living under the pseudonym Astra, she is determined to prove herself and become a full-fledged Tentacle. But when a critical heist goes sideways, the only way forward is for Lola to compete in the Liar’s Dice Tournament herself. Lola is confident in her ability to pull off any heist, but the Thief's mysterious brother, the Liar, runs the game and he turns out to be more than she bargained for. As her attraction for him grows and illusions run wild, she will be forced to confront the secrets of her past, the truth of the brothers’ shared history, and the lies she tells herself.
Den of Liars, by Jessica S. Olson, is the first installment in the author's The Devious duology, which mixes together high-stakes heists, magical intrigue, and a slow-burn romance set against the backdrop of a glittering casino where secrets are the ultimate prize. The story centers on Lola St. James, a young woman living under the alias Astra, who is bound to the Thief, the notorious leader of the Tentacles, by a magical bond that allows them to feel each other’s emotions through a shared heart.
This bond was formed when the Thief rescued her after her father’s devastating loss in the Liar’s Dice Tournament—a high-stakes magical competition where players wager their deepest secrets. Determined to prove herself as a full-fledged Tentacle, Lola embarks on a daring casino heist, but when it goes awry, she’s forced to enter the Liar’s Dice Tournament herself. There, she encounters the Thief’s enigmatic brother, the Liar, who runs the game and challenges her in ways she never expected.
As Lola navigates the tournament’s deadly mind games, she’s torn between her growing attraction to the Liar, her loyalty to the Thief, and the secrets of her past that threaten to unravel everything. Once the tournament begins, the plot accelerates, delivering a relentless series of twists, betrayals, and revelations that keep readers hooked. The heist elements, reminiscent of Ocean’s Eleven, blend seamlessly with the high-stakes magical tournament, creating a narrative that feels both action-packed and emotionally charged.
The novel also incorporates disability representation, with Lola having strabismic amblyopia (a “lazy eye”) and nearsightedness, requiring glasses. Olson, who shares these traits, authentically weaves this aspect into Lola’s character, highlighting her resilience without making it the sole focus of her identity. This representation has been celebrated as a meaningful addition to the fantasy genre, where such portrayals are rare.
The two brothers, the Thief (Enzo) and the Liar (Nic), are equally intriguing, their fraught relationship adding complexity to the story. Enzo, Lola’s best friend and partner, shares an emotional bond with her that feels deep and authentic, though it’s complicated by their shared heart. Nic, the Liar, is a charismatic and morally gray antagonist-turned-love interest, whose banter and tension with Lola spark some of the novel’s most memorable scenes. The dynamic between Lola, Enzo, and Nic forms a unique love triangle—not in the traditional sense, but one rooted in loyalty, betrayal, and competing desires.
This dynamic, combined with the brothers’ “deadly backstory,” keeps readers guessing about their true motives and adds emotional weight to Lola’s choices. With its strong heroine, morally gray brothers, and a cliffhanger that leaves readers scratching their heads, this book is a must-read for fans of Caraval, Kingdom of the Wicked, or The Inheritance Games.
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CHAPTER ONE
LOLA
Damn, if I don’t love a good police chase.
“Halt!” the cop behind us barks.
Enzo snorts next to me. “‘Halt’? Do they ever realize how ridiculous they sound?”
I laugh as our feet slap in tandem across the slippery roof tiles of Aethera’s factory district. Our heart thunders in my chest, and adrenaline sparks in my pulse as sharp as the electricity rumbling in the clouds overhead. “Wholly unoriginal,” I agree as we leap across an alleyway and land midstride on the next roof, never breaking our pace.
We haven’t been chased in at least a year, and I can’t help grinning as the constable falls farther and farther behind. With Enzo’s magical ability to render us both incorporeal, we’re always long gone by the time the police show up to the scene of our thefts. Which means our heists are usually uneventful.
But six minutes ago, when dancer Louelle Martine returned home early to get ready for her performance tonight at the Liar’s Den Casino, she caught a glimpse of us vanishing through the wall with the four-thousand-plat tutu she was supposed to wear. Unluckily for us, a constable was just next door managing a domestic disturbance. Her cries of “It’s the Thief! The Thief!” had him hot on our trail in seconds.
The tutu is valuable, sure, but the Thief? His capture would be worth far more.
Since he and his brother, the Liar, rose to infamy five years ago for their magical powers, Enzo has become something of a myth. Most believe him dead thanks to a slew of rumors he started soon after he met me, but those who have recognized him during one of his cons whisper stories of a bejeweled specter who haunts the streets, seeking revenge for his ruination.
Not entirely incorrect, if you ask me.
Rain mists above our heads, and my breath fogs up the lenses of my glasses as we dodge chimneys and radio antennas, dislodged shingles and electrical wires. Enzo and I have done a thousand heists together, and we move like a pair of dancers across a stage. When he turns, so do I. When I leap, he does, too. We may only share a heart, but after four years of heists and training, we may as well share a body, a mind, a soul.
We angle west toward where the iron-gray sea churns in the distance. We just have to get to the last apartment building four roofs away, and then he’ll magic us through to the ground floor, where our getaway motorcar waits on the street.
Leap, roll, dash. Grasp arms, swing a pirouette around a smokestack, launch in an arc to the next roof. My poor depth perception, courtesy of the severe nearsightedness in my lazy eye, was a difficulty early on in my training, but now my body instinctively tracks Enzo in a way that ensures I always land on my feet. In turn, his typical rigidity bleeds away when he works with me, his body mimicking the lethal grace mine learned from a childhood of ballet training.
Together, we are unstoppable.
“Halt!” The police officer’s voice is a gasp, so far behind us it’s almost lost in the intensifying roar of the sea.
We finally reach the last roof. The ocean slams against the cliff mere yards from the base of this sixteen-floor structure, which trembles in the angry wind. Enzo jams his hand into his pocket, pulling out a lump of raw voratium so dark it seems to suck in the light of the streetlamps below, and presses the metal between our palms.
I wait for the familiar sensation of my body rippling into nothing, the weightlessness like a balloon inflating in my chest, the bubbling tingle of my limbs turning to air.
But only Enzo vanishes. My body barely flickers.
With a growl, Enzo reappears, chucking the voratium off the roof. “Damn it, this better not all be bum voratium.” He digs into his pocket again, retrieving a whole handful of the pitch-dark metal and gripping my palm.
Once more, when his body mists into nothing, mine stays firmly corporeal.
“Magnus St. James, you bastard!” He reappears, hurling the lot of metal as far as he can and letting out a string of curses I feel like bursts of rage in my own chest.
My father’s name, a dirty word on his lips, makes shame simmer under my skin. It’s becoming harder and harder to get our hands on good voratium these days with the way St. James has monopolized the entire industry. We steal what we can, and this lot came directly from one of his top lackeys, so we assumed it would be pure.
But it seems my father doesn’t do even his own staff favors.
Memories of him teaching me all about voratium ripple across my mind. The business of mining it, polishing it, driving up its price. All over again, I see the textbooks he had me study, their pages full of diagrams of the precise angles lumenors use to direct starlight into the metal. I glimpse his cunning smile, hear his sawdust voice describing how I will one day inherit his illicit network of families and businesses, all loyal to our name because of the power we wield with our voratium and our corruption.
All my life, I was his little secret. A weapon, stored away for her own protection until the day she would take her father’s place as the most infamous crime boss in history.
But that future died four years ago. To keep my father’s enemies from hunting us after Enzo whisked me away from them, we went to great lengths to convince the world I’d been killed. A corpse wearing a face doctored to look like mine was dumped on the street outside the warehouse I’d been locked in, and my father never knew the difference.
Every time I think of him, my chest constricts. Dust like glass in my lungs, hurt like ice in my veins, sting like poison at the corners of my eyes.
Because when he thought Magnolia St. James had been kidnapped, he did not come for her. And when he thought she had died, he did not cry, did not care.
That was when I learned the difference between the lies told to protect the ones you love and the lies told to make a person think that’s what you’re doing. Lies that last a whole childhood, lies that tell you they love you and that you matter and that you have a place, lies that slice through bone and muscle and tendon when they surface and leave you with a pain that hurts everywhere.
So I let Magnolia St. James die, and now I’m nothing more than her ghost, rippling through shadows with Enzo in the night. In the four years since I was kidnapped, I haven’t befriended anyone besides him, haven’t shown my face in daylight, haven’t even met Enzo’s gang of thieves he lovingly calls his Tentacles. Because I am too valuable, my heritage too dangerous, my existence a live wire ready to catch flame.
But tonight, as long as we make it through this heist and the one that comes after it at the Liar’s Den, I will finally prove to Enzo that I don’t need to stay in the shadows. That I’m enough of a con artist to manage the baggage of my history and my parentage. And when we finish this heist and break the curse that requires us to share a heart, my freedom will no longer be a liability.
Enzo stalks to the edge of the roof, his panic slicing like a knife through our shared heart. “How do we get you down, damn it?!”
The police officer’s cries grow. He’s only two roofs behind us now. We need to act fast.
I search our surroundings. None of the other buildings besides the one we just came from is close enough to reach by leaping. I lean over to survey the wall below. I’m an excellent climber, but the walls are lacquered in a glossy finish popular in this part of town that’s impossible to climb without a rope, and I don’t have one.
Whirling, I scan the area, cursing the smudges on my glasses that make it difficult to see. My gaze snags on an abandoned laundry line waving in the breeze, connecting this building to the one the police officer just leaped onto. Yanking out one of the two daggers strapped to my belt, I sprint toward the rope, hurling my blade toward the other end of the line. It slices through easily, bouncing off the opposing building and flipping to the street below as the rope drops, hanging only by the end connected to the window directly beneath my feet. Dropping to my stomach, I stretch my arms over the edge to detach the knot, then scramble back toward Enzo, dragging the rope behind me and shoving it at him, pointing at the massive smokestack at the apex of the roof.
“That rope isn’t long enough to even go around the whole chimney, let alone reach the street,” he protests.
“Good thing it doesn’t need to go around the chimney.” I raise my brow.
His eyes glint as he gathers the rope. “Knew I kept you around for something.” He vanishes, and the rope does with him, reappearing with its end through the brick of the chimney as Enzo coalesces on the other side.
I grasp it with both fists. “I’ll meet you at the car,” I call, swinging over the side of the roof.
A massive thud tells me the police officer just leaped to our building. I keep my eyes on the cobbled street below, feeling the burn of friction through my leather gloves as I slide down, feet skidding along the slick wall.
LOLA
Damn, if I don’t love a good police chase.
“Halt!” the cop behind us barks.
Enzo snorts next to me. “‘Halt’? Do they ever realize how ridiculous they sound?”
I laugh as our feet slap in tandem across the slippery roof tiles of Aethera’s factory district. Our heart thunders in my chest, and adrenaline sparks in my pulse as sharp as the electricity rumbling in the clouds overhead. “Wholly unoriginal,” I agree as we leap across an alleyway and land midstride on the next roof, never breaking our pace.
We haven’t been chased in at least a year, and I can’t help grinning as the constable falls farther and farther behind. With Enzo’s magical ability to render us both incorporeal, we’re always long gone by the time the police show up to the scene of our thefts. Which means our heists are usually uneventful.
But six minutes ago, when dancer Louelle Martine returned home early to get ready for her performance tonight at the Liar’s Den Casino, she caught a glimpse of us vanishing through the wall with the four-thousand-plat tutu she was supposed to wear. Unluckily for us, a constable was just next door managing a domestic disturbance. Her cries of “It’s the Thief! The Thief!” had him hot on our trail in seconds.
The tutu is valuable, sure, but the Thief? His capture would be worth far more.
Since he and his brother, the Liar, rose to infamy five years ago for their magical powers, Enzo has become something of a myth. Most believe him dead thanks to a slew of rumors he started soon after he met me, but those who have recognized him during one of his cons whisper stories of a bejeweled specter who haunts the streets, seeking revenge for his ruination.
Not entirely incorrect, if you ask me.
Rain mists above our heads, and my breath fogs up the lenses of my glasses as we dodge chimneys and radio antennas, dislodged shingles and electrical wires. Enzo and I have done a thousand heists together, and we move like a pair of dancers across a stage. When he turns, so do I. When I leap, he does, too. We may only share a heart, but after four years of heists and training, we may as well share a body, a mind, a soul.
We angle west toward where the iron-gray sea churns in the distance. We just have to get to the last apartment building four roofs away, and then he’ll magic us through to the ground floor, where our getaway motorcar waits on the street.
Leap, roll, dash. Grasp arms, swing a pirouette around a smokestack, launch in an arc to the next roof. My poor depth perception, courtesy of the severe nearsightedness in my lazy eye, was a difficulty early on in my training, but now my body instinctively tracks Enzo in a way that ensures I always land on my feet. In turn, his typical rigidity bleeds away when he works with me, his body mimicking the lethal grace mine learned from a childhood of ballet training.
Together, we are unstoppable.
“Halt!” The police officer’s voice is a gasp, so far behind us it’s almost lost in the intensifying roar of the sea.
We finally reach the last roof. The ocean slams against the cliff mere yards from the base of this sixteen-floor structure, which trembles in the angry wind. Enzo jams his hand into his pocket, pulling out a lump of raw voratium so dark it seems to suck in the light of the streetlamps below, and presses the metal between our palms.
I wait for the familiar sensation of my body rippling into nothing, the weightlessness like a balloon inflating in my chest, the bubbling tingle of my limbs turning to air.
But only Enzo vanishes. My body barely flickers.
With a growl, Enzo reappears, chucking the voratium off the roof. “Damn it, this better not all be bum voratium.” He digs into his pocket again, retrieving a whole handful of the pitch-dark metal and gripping my palm.
Once more, when his body mists into nothing, mine stays firmly corporeal.
“Magnus St. James, you bastard!” He reappears, hurling the lot of metal as far as he can and letting out a string of curses I feel like bursts of rage in my own chest.
My father’s name, a dirty word on his lips, makes shame simmer under my skin. It’s becoming harder and harder to get our hands on good voratium these days with the way St. James has monopolized the entire industry. We steal what we can, and this lot came directly from one of his top lackeys, so we assumed it would be pure.
But it seems my father doesn’t do even his own staff favors.
Memories of him teaching me all about voratium ripple across my mind. The business of mining it, polishing it, driving up its price. All over again, I see the textbooks he had me study, their pages full of diagrams of the precise angles lumenors use to direct starlight into the metal. I glimpse his cunning smile, hear his sawdust voice describing how I will one day inherit his illicit network of families and businesses, all loyal to our name because of the power we wield with our voratium and our corruption.
All my life, I was his little secret. A weapon, stored away for her own protection until the day she would take her father’s place as the most infamous crime boss in history.
But that future died four years ago. To keep my father’s enemies from hunting us after Enzo whisked me away from them, we went to great lengths to convince the world I’d been killed. A corpse wearing a face doctored to look like mine was dumped on the street outside the warehouse I’d been locked in, and my father never knew the difference.
Every time I think of him, my chest constricts. Dust like glass in my lungs, hurt like ice in my veins, sting like poison at the corners of my eyes.
Because when he thought Magnolia St. James had been kidnapped, he did not come for her. And when he thought she had died, he did not cry, did not care.
That was when I learned the difference between the lies told to protect the ones you love and the lies told to make a person think that’s what you’re doing. Lies that last a whole childhood, lies that tell you they love you and that you matter and that you have a place, lies that slice through bone and muscle and tendon when they surface and leave you with a pain that hurts everywhere.
So I let Magnolia St. James die, and now I’m nothing more than her ghost, rippling through shadows with Enzo in the night. In the four years since I was kidnapped, I haven’t befriended anyone besides him, haven’t shown my face in daylight, haven’t even met Enzo’s gang of thieves he lovingly calls his Tentacles. Because I am too valuable, my heritage too dangerous, my existence a live wire ready to catch flame.
But tonight, as long as we make it through this heist and the one that comes after it at the Liar’s Den, I will finally prove to Enzo that I don’t need to stay in the shadows. That I’m enough of a con artist to manage the baggage of my history and my parentage. And when we finish this heist and break the curse that requires us to share a heart, my freedom will no longer be a liability.
Enzo stalks to the edge of the roof, his panic slicing like a knife through our shared heart. “How do we get you down, damn it?!”
The police officer’s cries grow. He’s only two roofs behind us now. We need to act fast.
I search our surroundings. None of the other buildings besides the one we just came from is close enough to reach by leaping. I lean over to survey the wall below. I’m an excellent climber, but the walls are lacquered in a glossy finish popular in this part of town that’s impossible to climb without a rope, and I don’t have one.
Whirling, I scan the area, cursing the smudges on my glasses that make it difficult to see. My gaze snags on an abandoned laundry line waving in the breeze, connecting this building to the one the police officer just leaped onto. Yanking out one of the two daggers strapped to my belt, I sprint toward the rope, hurling my blade toward the other end of the line. It slices through easily, bouncing off the opposing building and flipping to the street below as the rope drops, hanging only by the end connected to the window directly beneath my feet. Dropping to my stomach, I stretch my arms over the edge to detach the knot, then scramble back toward Enzo, dragging the rope behind me and shoving it at him, pointing at the massive smokestack at the apex of the roof.
“That rope isn’t long enough to even go around the whole chimney, let alone reach the street,” he protests.
“Good thing it doesn’t need to go around the chimney.” I raise my brow.
His eyes glint as he gathers the rope. “Knew I kept you around for something.” He vanishes, and the rope does with him, reappearing with its end through the brick of the chimney as Enzo coalesces on the other side.
I grasp it with both fists. “I’ll meet you at the car,” I call, swinging over the side of the roof.
A massive thud tells me the police officer just leaped to our building. I keep my eyes on the cobbled street below, feeling the burn of friction through my leather gloves as I slide down, feet skidding along the slick wall.
Ooh interesting. This is one that caught my eye with the gorgeous cover! It sounds like an intriguing read but I also feel a little hesitant. It's definitely one I will continue to keep an eye on! Glad you enjoyed it for the most part! Nice review!
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