Synopsis:

It’s the season
for treason…

The king of Yusan must die.

The five most dangerous liars in the land have been mysteriously summoned to work together for a single objective: to kill the God King Joon.

He has it coming. Under his merciless immortal hand, the nobles flourish, while the poor and innocent are imprisoned, ruined…or sold.

And now each of the five blades will come for him. Each has tasted bitterness―from the hired hitman seeking atonement, a lovely assassin who seeks freedom, or even the prince banished for his cruel crimes. None can resist the sweet, icy lure of vengeance.

They can agree on murder.

They can agree on treachery.

But for these five killers―each versed in deception, lies, and betrayal―it’s not enough to forge an alliance. To survive, they’ll have to find a way to trust each other…but only one can take the crown.

Let the best liar win.

Rating:

Review:

As a whole this book was utterly enjoyable. The world created was interesting and rich. The narrative was intriguing and I was excited to see where it went next. As a summary, this was a great book.

The premise of this story is simple. King Joon is a bad man. He does terrible things and there is a plot to assassinate him. The only problem is that he proclaims to be a God. There have been previous assassination attempts and he was miraculously not harmed. But, there is a plan and they need a very specific cast of liars and thieves to pull it off.

First we meet Royo. He’s the town heavy. He is muscle for hire. If you need someone killed, beaten, taught a lesson then Royo is the guy to call. He gets pulled into this scheme by Aeri. She’s a thief, who has been invited into this plot and she hires Royo to protect her and be her bodyguard. Then we have Sora. Sora is an indentured woman and so is her sister. The Count who holds her indenture turned her into a poison maiden. He intentionally poisoned her over and over again until she became immune to all poisons, and he uses her to seduce and poison men that he wishes to kill. Tiyung is the Count’s son and has been instructed to go with Sora on this mission and then if she is successful, he will grant her freedom. Euyn is next and he is the King’s exiled brother. He was exiled for hunting prisoners like animals and left buried in the desert to die. Except that he didn’t die. He escaped and has been trying to keep a low profile ever since. And finally Mikhail. He is the mastermind behind the whole plot. He is also the King’s spymaster.

All of this main cast of characters gets their turn to narrate portions of the story. They all had a distinct voice so I had very little trouble keeping track of which story was being narrated. My biggest complaint about the story is that the different narratives were so short. The longest section was 5 or 6 pages, most of them were 2 or 3 pages. It didn’t give me a lot of time to get invested in this new piece to the story and then it was over. And almost every single section ended on a cliffhanger of sorts. That got tiring really fast. So I wish that we got longer sections in one narrative and that we didn’t have a cliffhanger every few pages. But those were my only complaints.

The ending of this book was masterful. I don’t want to give away any spoilers so I will keep this high level. Obviously, because this is the first book in a series, you can reasonably expect that the assassination plot doesn’t go to plan. It would be a much shorter book and no sequel potential if everything went according to plan. I don’t think that’s a spoiler, I think most readers would figure out from the beginning how that’s going to play out. Even so, there were some twists in there that I never saw coming. And they were brilliant. The ending completely sold me on the next book. I’m all in and will definitely be reading it.