9 books like Six of Crows, from The Lies of Locke Lamora to The Gilded Wolves: heist fantasy and found-family crews matched to what you loved.
Updated June 10, 2026
Six of Crows is the rare spinoff that outgrew its source. Leigh Bardugo took the world of her Shadow and Bone trilogy, moved it to Ketterdam, a grimy merchant city modeled on Dutch-era Amsterdam, and built a heist: six criminals breaking into the Ice Court, the most secure fortress in the world. What made it a phenomenon was not the job but the crew. Kaz Brekker's gang of thieves, sharpshooters, spies, and one reluctant witch hunter gave readers the found-family dynamic, the rotating points of view, and the no mourners, no funerals loyalty that a decade of fantasy has been chasing since.
Readers come away wanting one of three things, and this list is sorted accordingly. If it was the heist and the banter, The Lies of Locke Lamora and The Gilded Wolves are the two books most often pressed into Six of Crows fans' hands. If it was the crew dynamics and morally gray scheming in a young adult register, The Cruel Prince, An Ember in the Ashes, and The Bone Season carry that forward. And if it was Ketterdam itself, a fantasy city with politics, religion, and an underworld that feels real, A Darker Shade of Magic, City of Stairs, and The Poppy War scratch the worldbuilding itch, with Shadow and Bone here for completists who want the Grishaverse from the beginning.
One practical note: several of these run notably darker or more adult than Six of Crows, and two (The Poppy War, The Lies of Locke Lamora) are significantly more violent. Each entry below says which part of Bardugo's book it matches and how far it strays, so you can pick by what you actually loved.
Read this if you want more Grishaverse, with expectations set correctly.
This is where Bardugo's world begins: the same magic system, the same nations, the same Grisha powers that shape everything in Six of Crows. Alina Starkov, a mapmaker in Ravka's army, discovers she can summon light, which makes her the country's best hope against the Shadow Fold and a piece in the Darkling's game. Reading it fills in the history Six of Crows assumes you know, and characters and events from this trilogy echo directly through Kaz's story. The Netflix adaptation famously wove the two casts together.
Be honest about what it is, though: an earlier, more conventional book. Shadow and Bone is a chosen-one story with a love triangle, told in one voice, and it has none of the heist structure or ensemble crackle that made Six of Crows special. Bardugo's writing visibly levels up between the trilogies. Read it if you want the full Grishaverse map and the Darkling's arc. If you only want another crew of charming criminals, other books on this list will serve you better.
Read this if Kaz's scheming and ruthlessness were what hooked you.
Holly Black's Elfhame books share the exact pleasure of watching an underdog out-plot everyone in the room. Jude Duarte is a mortal girl raised in the faerie court, despised and powerless among beings who cannot lie but never need to, and she compensates the way Kaz Brekker does: with espionage, blackmail, leverage, and a willingness to go further than anyone expects. The twists land with the same trapdoor satisfaction as Kaz's reveals, and Jude's hostile dynamic with Prince Cardan runs on the same wire of antagonism that powered Kaz and Inej or Nina and Matthias, though with sharper edges.
The differences are real: there is no heist and no crew. Jude is a lone operator inside court politics, so you trade the found-family warmth for one girl against the world, and the faerie setting is lusher and crueler than Ketterdam's mercantile grime. The romance also takes far more space than anything Bardugo allows. Pick it for scheming and twists; skip it if the six-person ensemble was the whole point for you.
Read this for high stakes and divided loyalties in a far more brutal world.
Sabaa Tahir's series shares the engine that drives Six of Crows: young people with conflicting allegiances forced into impossible jobs, each with a person they cannot afford to lose. Laia, whose family is destroyed by the Martial Empire, goes undercover as a slave inside its most feared military academy to save her brother; Elias, the academy's finest soldier, wants nothing more than to desert. Their alternating chapters create the same tension Bardugo gets from Nina and Matthias, enemies by training whose interests keep tangling, and the infiltration plot delivers a similar slow-burn dread to the Ice Court job.
Know that this is a war story, not a caper. The Empire is modeled on Rome at its most merciless, and the violence, threat, and grief run well past Six of Crows; there is no banter-driven crew levity to cut it. The scope also widens with each sequel into full rebellion and empire-scale conflict. Choose it when you want the moral weight and the stakes without needing the heist scaffolding.
Read this if you want the Six of Crows formula itself, relocated to 1889 Paris.
Roshani Chokshi's novel is the most direct heir on this list, openly working the Six of Crows template: a wounded, brilliant leader (the hotelier Séverin) assembles a specialist crew, a historian, an engineer, a dancer and spy, a botanist, to steal an artifact from a secretive order, with chapters rotating through the crew and banter doing half the narration. The found-family dynamics, the slow-burn pairings, and the heist set pieces map almost one to one onto Bardugo's structure, and Chokshi adds a layer Bardugo does not attempt: her crew are mostly colonized and marginalized people robbing the empires that erased them, which gives the thefts a pointed charge.
The trade-offs: the magic system, called Forging, is fuzzier than Grisha power, and the plot leans on puzzles and symbology (think a fantasy Da Vinci Code) more than on Kaz-style con artistry, so some readers find the schemes less airtight. The prose is more ornate, the pace a touch slower. It is the safest recommendation here for someone who wants the same reading experience again rather than a harder or darker variation.
Read this if Ketterdam's politics and texture mattered more to you than the heist.
Robert Jackson Bennett's novel is for the reader who kept noticing how good Bardugo's worldbuilding was. Bulikov was once the seat of gods who were killed by the people they enslaved, and now the conquerors rule the conquered while the city's miraculous architecture lies broken. Into this walks Shara, an unassuming spy investigating a murder that unravels into questions about whether the gods are entirely dead. It has what Six of Crows fans actually loved about Ketterdam, a city where religion, empire, and commerce grind against each other, plus an operative heroine and a hulking secretary, Sigrud, who out-Matthiases Matthias.
This is adult fantasy in register as well as shelving: the protagonists are professionals in their thirties, the plot is espionage and theology rather than a heist, and there is no ensemble of teenagers and no romance arc to speak of. The pace is more deliberate. It is the pick on this list most likely to become a new favorite for readers ready to graduate from YA, and the least likely to satisfy someone who mainly wanted more banter.
Read this for a thief, a smuggler, and a city-hopping adventure with style.
V.E. Schwab's novel runs on a duo rather than a crew, but the duo is very Ketterdam: Kell, one of the last magicians able to walk between four parallel Londons, smuggles trinkets across worlds on the side, and Lila Bard is a cutpurse and aspiring pirate who picks his pocket and refuses to leave the story. Lila in particular is the draw for Six of Crows readers, a ruthless, knife-happy thief with Kaz's appetite for danger and none of his planning, and the cross-world chase structure delivers the same propulsive job-gone-wrong momentum as the Ice Court sequence.
What it lacks is the ensemble: two leads instead of six means fewer interlocking loyalties and less of the group banter that defines Bardugo's book. The worldbuilding trades Ketterdam's dense street-level realism for a high-concept conceit, four Londons with different levels of magic, that is vivid but thinner underfoot. The trilogy deepens considerably as it goes and the cast grows. Best for readers who rank adventure and voice above intricate scheming.
Read this if you want criminal syndicates and a heroine in enemy territory.
Samantha Shannon's series opens inside a criminal underworld that will feel familiar in shape: Paige Mahoney is a dreamwalker working for a clairvoyant crime syndicate in a 2059 London where her kind of mind-power is a capital offense, and her syndicate boss has more than a little Per Haskell and Kaz in him. When she is captured and shipped to a hidden prison city run by otherworldly masters, the book becomes an infiltration-and-escape story with the same texture Six of Crows fans love: gang politics, coded slang, shifting alliances, and a captor-captive dynamic with real tension.
It is the densest read on this list. Shannon front-loads an enormous amount of invented terminology and clairvoyant taxonomy (early editions shipped with a chart), and the first hundred pages ask for patience that Bardugo never demands. It is also dystopian science fantasy rather than secondary-world fantasy, and the planned seven-book arc is a serious commitment. Rewarding for worldbuilding lovers; wrong for someone who wants a tight, finished duology.
Read this only if you want the moral grayness pushed all the way to black.
R.F. Kuang's debut connects to Six of Crows through its characters' willingness to cross lines, and then keeps going long after Bardugo would stop. Rin, a dark-skinned war orphan from the provinces, aces the empire's examination into its elite military academy, where she is despised by aristocratic classmates and discovers a shamanic power that talks back. The academy half of the book has the competitive, scrappy-underdog pleasure YA readers know; the second half becomes a war novel drawing directly on the Second Sino-Japanese War, and Rin's choices make Kaz Brekker look gentle.
This is the darkest book on the list by a wide margin. Kuang depicts atrocity, including a chapter modeled on the Nanjing Massacre, with deliberate unflinching detail, and the trilogy is a tragedy in structure, not a triumph. There is no heist, no found-family comfort, and the humor is gallows-only. Read it when you are ready for adult grimdark with historical weight. Do not hand it to someone who loved Six of Crows for Jesper's one-liners.
Read this for the best fantasy heist crew ever written, in full adult mode.
Scott Lynch's debut is the book Six of Crows is most often compared to, and the family resemblance is unmistakable: a brilliant orphan con artist, Locke Lamora, leads the Gentleman Bastards, a small crew of thieves running elaborate long cons on the nobility of Camorr, a canal-veined city that reads like Venice to Ketterdam's Amsterdam. The pleasures are identical in kind and bigger in scale: schemes nested inside schemes, crew loyalty that genuinely hurts when tested, and a city underworld with its own rules, oaths, and secret history. Interludes showing Locke's education as a child con artist do for him what Kaz's flashbacks do for Kaz.
It is adult fantasy in every sense: profanity-dense dialogue, graphic violence, and a midsection where the cost of the con turns genuinely savage. The pacing is also looser, with flashbacks braided through the present-day plot, and the series is famously unfinished, with long gaps between sequels (the first three books stand well enough on their own). For most readers who loved the Crows and can handle the content step up, this is the single best recommendation on the list.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch is the standard comparison: a genius thief leading a tight-knit crew of con artists in a Venice-like fantasy city, written for adults with more profanity and violence. Within YA, The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi is the closest match, using the same rotating-POV heist-crew structure in a magical 1889 Paris.
Should I read Shadow and Bone before Six of Crows?
You do not have to. Six of Crows was written to stand alone and many readers start there, which is also why it works as a recommendation target on its own. Reading the Shadow and Bone trilogy first fills in the Grisha magic system, Ravkan history, and a few cameos, and chronologically it comes first, but most fans agree Six of Crows is the stronger work either way.
What should I read after finishing Crooked Kingdom?
Within the Grishaverse, the King of Scars duology (Nikolai's story) continues directly after Crooked Kingdom and features some of the Crows' world and consequences. Outside it, the usual ladder is The Gilded Wolves if you want to stay in YA heist territory, then The Lies of Locke Lamora or City of Stairs when you are ready for adult fantasy with the same urban scheming.
Are the books on this list as dark as Six of Crows?
They range on both sides of it. The Gilded Wolves and A Darker Shade of Magic sit at roughly the same level. The Cruel Prince and The Bone Season run somewhat sharper. An Ember in the Ashes, The Lies of Locke Lamora, and especially The Poppy War are significantly darker, with war atrocity and graphic violence; The Poppy War in particular is adult grimdark and worth checking content notes before starting.
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