Format: Hardcover, 560 pages
Release Date: April 1, 2025
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Source: Publisher
Genre: Young Adult / Dark Fantasy
Time magic, betrayals, and doppelgängers await in this enchanting and explosive final installment of the Little Thieves trilogy by Indie Next author Margaret Owen.
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It has been almost two years since she defeated the vengeful spirit of her mother, but Vanja Ros, no longer Schmidt, has finally made a name for herself. She is a God Daughter, a (reformed) thief, a sister (surprisingly!), and now a folk hero. She stands up for those with nothing against the few who have everything, bringing justice and prosperity where she can. But even a beloved woman of the people cannot keep her darkest shadows from the light forever. Deep-seated hatred has spurred a forgotten foe into action. And as old flames, adversaries, and allies resurface, Vanja must face what it took to become the Pfennigist once and for all.
It will take everything Vanja is to save not only herself and the people she loves, but time as we know it. In this thrilling final chapter of the Indie Next series, Little Thieves, Margaret Owen shows us the beauty and peace we find in loving—and forgiving—ourselves for past mistakes.
Margaret Owen's Holy Terrors is the third installment in the author's Little Thieves series. Holy Terrors forces Vanja to confront the full weight of her past choices—and decide who she’ll become when the dust settles. Set nearly two years after the events of Painted Devils, Holy Terrors finds Vanja operating solo as the Pfennigeist, a folk hero who robs the corrupt to aid the desperate across the Blessed Empire of Almandy. Her signature red penny has become a symbol of justice—until a serial killer begins leaving it at the scenes of royal murders, turning her legacy into a nightmare.
When even the Blessed Empress falls, the empire teeters on the brink of collapse, and the seven royal families must elect a successor within weeks or risk reality itself unraveling. Vanja’s forced back into the fray, reuniting with Journeyman Prefect Emeric Conrad—the boy whose heart she broke—to clear her name and save those she loves. What follows is a whirlwind of bloody conspiracies, sinister magic, and old enemies, all woven into a narrative that is as thrilling as it's poignant. The two years apart have changed them both—Vanja into a folk hero with a tarnished reputation, and Emeric into a more seasoned prefect—but their chemistry remains the beating heart of the series.
The central mystery of the killer framing Vanja unfolds with twists that are both shocking and satisfying, while the looming threat of reality’s collapse adds a cosmic urgency. The stakes feel personal, even as the fate of an empire hangs in the balance. And yet, it’s the more minor details—Vanja’s doodles on Emeric’s notes, the absurdity of a haunted doll, the sausage references—that keep the tone delightfully irreverent. Vanja’s journey from an abused, abandoned girl to a figure of legend is complete here, but not without cost. Owen doesn’t hand her a neat, happy-ever-after; instead, she earns a future shaped by her own hands, scars, and all.
It’s a conclusion that respects her complexity, refusing to sand down her edges. Complicated themes of choice, power, love, and freedom are expertly woven throughout this breakneck book. Unwanted by her own parents, raised by Death and Fortune, Vanja deals with so much in this story that it's a wonder that she can keep her wits about her. I loved the addition of Junior the cat, mainly because he made me smile with his antics and had to share custody between Vanja and Emeric. I loved the graphics between chapters, which show Vanja in different situations she has found herself in over the past 19 years. This book features numerous important characters, including Gisele, Ragne & Oskar, and a dangerous character from Vanja's past, so I had to use index cards to keep track of who was who and their significance.
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THE SEVENTH CHOICE
CROSSROADS
Once upon a time, at the very dawn of summer, on the loneliest road in the woods, the daughter of Death and Fortune came to a crossroads.
It was a solitude of her own making, and a choice she had wrought upon herself. For two weeks, she had ridden with the Wild Hunt, paying a debt and fleeing the greatest and worst of her crimes. Now that she had served her time, Brunne the Huntress had been generous enough to leave her anywhere she chose, so long as it was within the Huntress’s domain.
But if there was one thing the daughter of Death and Fortune had learned by then, it was that she had commitment issues.
She could not tell the Huntress where to take her, not even with sunrise bearing down. And so Brunne had left her here, at a crossroads.
The irony did not escape the goddaughter.
She stood in the ebbing dim of the woods under a jade sky, drowning in the murmur of leaves in the breeze, in the prodding birdsong, in the pull of two roads that could not both be walked.
The road to the east would take her to Rammelbeck, where she’d found her calling. There was no shortage of little despots exploiting the powerless and insulating themselves from consequence with cozy privilege. It would take her to a new beginning: putting her more illicit talents to work, piercing those golden cocoons. Becoming the vengeful ghost of everyone the law had failed.
But …
The road to the west would take her to Helligbrücke.
Helligbrücke, where she’d find the boy who had given her everything—his trust, his love, his body in the bed they shared—and who she had abandoned for reasons she told herself were just, if so bitter they yet burned. His own mentor had intended to use her against him, to make him choose between her and his dream of being a prefect. And she’d realized that no matter what, she would always be an open grave for him to stumble into.
Whatever she touches falls to ruin, her mother had said years ago—and so she had amputated herself, before the rot could spread.
But for the past two weeks, she’d wondered … was this the best way? Simply vanishing, instead of making him face the cold truths they’d both avoided? Would he have let her go? Or worse—insisted he would stay? Could she bear it, letting him give up everything for her?
The daughter of Death and Fortune stood at the crossroads while savage sunlight welled up and bled over the horizon. She weighed, debated, and wrestled. And finally—
She went west, to Helligbrücke.
A few days later, at dusk, the boy she loved opened the door to his quarters and found her sitting on the sill of the open window.
She told him everything. They fought, cried, gave in, reached for each other, and when morning came, it found them in the same bed. So did the next morning, and the next, and the days turned into weeks and months.
There were talks, arguments, uneasy truces. She started helping at the family book bindery, learning to stitch sheaves of paper and stamp patterns into leather. He asked his supervisors to only assign him cases within a week’s ride of Helligbrücke, and whenever his colleagues pulled him aside, he kept his answers short: Yes, she was the Pfennigeist. No, not anymore. No, I’m not concerned.
He never said a single bitter word when the promotions passed him over, when the whispers hounded them down the street, whenever he solved another prefect’s case from halfway across the empire just by reading the initial report and had to wait to see if it wasn’t bungled too severely. She felt it all the same, reading it in the lines around his mouth, the tension in his shoulders as he kissed her forehead before blowing out the candle on their bedside table each night.
She never cut another purse, never stashed cards up her sleeves unless it was for a trick for her nieces; she didn’t even lie as much. She wasn’t very skilled at bookbinding, but she enjoyed his family, their customers, and the steady, honest work. It was sufficient to make a life for herself.
(That, there-that was the lie.)
He saw it every time her gaze caught on a courier in royal livery, on the fine coaches that rolled past beggar girls, even just on the scar of the horizon beyond Helligbrücke.
They both felt it, the air running out of the coffins where they’d buried their dreams alive. Nevertheless, neither was willing to take up a shovel. Not if it meant breaking the ground they stood on.
Not even as inch by inch, day by day, year by year, those graves grew into sinkholes.
But that isn’t my story. That was not my choice.
That isn’t how it ends.
When I stood at the crossroads, my heart so damn tired after a fortnight of endless wringing, I chose at long last to go … east. To haunt those the law could not touch. To follow the road that started with a saint’s entreaty and made justice into a mending of damage, not just the punishment of criminals. To begin with Rammelbeck and steal whatever scraps of justice I could from the Blessed Empire of Almandy.
And I did falter. I went to Helligbrücke a few weeks later, desperate to see Emeric again. I watched from the back of a crowd as, surrounded by friends and family, he was ordained the youngest prefect in history.
A prefect who, by his own holy oath, would be bound to find and stop me.
I still couldn’t tell you if I made the right choice leaving him the way I did in May, not truly.
But the moment of his ordination, my heart broke again, for I knew: He was where he was meant to be. There was a hole in the empire, one girl like me fell through every hour. Only someone like him would reach out to catch them.
And where his reach ended, my path began.
So on that midsummer day, for the third and final time, I turned from him and fled. I buried my heart at the crossroads and reached instead for the ghost.
CHAPTER ONE
HOUSE OF DEATH
It has been nearly sixteen months since I claimed this road as my own, and I have come far enough through cunning and deceit that people know me mostly as the Pfennigeist now.
Thud-thud. The bier-cart I’m currently hiding in lurches into motion over the slate tiles of the chapel, the folds of a fine linen sheet rippling on all sides as the wheels groan. I try to hold in my own groan at the answering ache in my limbs, and try harder not to resent the fact that this job was supposed to be easy.
It’s just one ring. One ring, but it’s been on public display here in Death’s temple in Lüdz for ten days, so my only window was between the tortuous two-hour funeral and the ghoulish entombment rites we’re rolling toward.
One ring, and it’s still on the finger of the late Prinz-wahl Ludwig von Wälft, who is lying in garish state a mere foot and a half above.
CROSSROADS
Once upon a time, at the very dawn of summer, on the loneliest road in the woods, the daughter of Death and Fortune came to a crossroads.
It was a solitude of her own making, and a choice she had wrought upon herself. For two weeks, she had ridden with the Wild Hunt, paying a debt and fleeing the greatest and worst of her crimes. Now that she had served her time, Brunne the Huntress had been generous enough to leave her anywhere she chose, so long as it was within the Huntress’s domain.
But if there was one thing the daughter of Death and Fortune had learned by then, it was that she had commitment issues.
She could not tell the Huntress where to take her, not even with sunrise bearing down. And so Brunne had left her here, at a crossroads.
The irony did not escape the goddaughter.
She stood in the ebbing dim of the woods under a jade sky, drowning in the murmur of leaves in the breeze, in the prodding birdsong, in the pull of two roads that could not both be walked.
The road to the east would take her to Rammelbeck, where she’d found her calling. There was no shortage of little despots exploiting the powerless and insulating themselves from consequence with cozy privilege. It would take her to a new beginning: putting her more illicit talents to work, piercing those golden cocoons. Becoming the vengeful ghost of everyone the law had failed.
But …
The road to the west would take her to Helligbrücke.
Helligbrücke, where she’d find the boy who had given her everything—his trust, his love, his body in the bed they shared—and who she had abandoned for reasons she told herself were just, if so bitter they yet burned. His own mentor had intended to use her against him, to make him choose between her and his dream of being a prefect. And she’d realized that no matter what, she would always be an open grave for him to stumble into.
Whatever she touches falls to ruin, her mother had said years ago—and so she had amputated herself, before the rot could spread.
But for the past two weeks, she’d wondered … was this the best way? Simply vanishing, instead of making him face the cold truths they’d both avoided? Would he have let her go? Or worse—insisted he would stay? Could she bear it, letting him give up everything for her?
The daughter of Death and Fortune stood at the crossroads while savage sunlight welled up and bled over the horizon. She weighed, debated, and wrestled. And finally—
She went west, to Helligbrücke.
A few days later, at dusk, the boy she loved opened the door to his quarters and found her sitting on the sill of the open window.
She told him everything. They fought, cried, gave in, reached for each other, and when morning came, it found them in the same bed. So did the next morning, and the next, and the days turned into weeks and months.
There were talks, arguments, uneasy truces. She started helping at the family book bindery, learning to stitch sheaves of paper and stamp patterns into leather. He asked his supervisors to only assign him cases within a week’s ride of Helligbrücke, and whenever his colleagues pulled him aside, he kept his answers short: Yes, she was the Pfennigeist. No, not anymore. No, I’m not concerned.
He never said a single bitter word when the promotions passed him over, when the whispers hounded them down the street, whenever he solved another prefect’s case from halfway across the empire just by reading the initial report and had to wait to see if it wasn’t bungled too severely. She felt it all the same, reading it in the lines around his mouth, the tension in his shoulders as he kissed her forehead before blowing out the candle on their bedside table each night.
She never cut another purse, never stashed cards up her sleeves unless it was for a trick for her nieces; she didn’t even lie as much. She wasn’t very skilled at bookbinding, but she enjoyed his family, their customers, and the steady, honest work. It was sufficient to make a life for herself.
(That, there-that was the lie.)
He saw it every time her gaze caught on a courier in royal livery, on the fine coaches that rolled past beggar girls, even just on the scar of the horizon beyond Helligbrücke.
They both felt it, the air running out of the coffins where they’d buried their dreams alive. Nevertheless, neither was willing to take up a shovel. Not if it meant breaking the ground they stood on.
Not even as inch by inch, day by day, year by year, those graves grew into sinkholes.
But that isn’t my story. That was not my choice.
That isn’t how it ends.
When I stood at the crossroads, my heart so damn tired after a fortnight of endless wringing, I chose at long last to go … east. To haunt those the law could not touch. To follow the road that started with a saint’s entreaty and made justice into a mending of damage, not just the punishment of criminals. To begin with Rammelbeck and steal whatever scraps of justice I could from the Blessed Empire of Almandy.
And I did falter. I went to Helligbrücke a few weeks later, desperate to see Emeric again. I watched from the back of a crowd as, surrounded by friends and family, he was ordained the youngest prefect in history.
A prefect who, by his own holy oath, would be bound to find and stop me.
I still couldn’t tell you if I made the right choice leaving him the way I did in May, not truly.
But the moment of his ordination, my heart broke again, for I knew: He was where he was meant to be. There was a hole in the empire, one girl like me fell through every hour. Only someone like him would reach out to catch them.
And where his reach ended, my path began.
So on that midsummer day, for the third and final time, I turned from him and fled. I buried my heart at the crossroads and reached instead for the ghost.
CHAPTER ONE
HOUSE OF DEATH
It has been nearly sixteen months since I claimed this road as my own, and I have come far enough through cunning and deceit that people know me mostly as the Pfennigeist now.
Thud-thud. The bier-cart I’m currently hiding in lurches into motion over the slate tiles of the chapel, the folds of a fine linen sheet rippling on all sides as the wheels groan. I try to hold in my own groan at the answering ache in my limbs, and try harder not to resent the fact that this job was supposed to be easy.
It’s just one ring. One ring, but it’s been on public display here in Death’s temple in Lüdz for ten days, so my only window was between the tortuous two-hour funeral and the ghoulish entombment rites we’re rolling toward.
One ring, and it’s still on the finger of the late Prinz-wahl Ludwig von Wälft, who is lying in garish state a mere foot and a half above.
