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Crooked Kingdom continues the adventures of a gang of six criminals that began in Six of Crows. Where the duology’s first book follows the characters to the Fjerdan court, Crooked Kingdom unfolds on the streets of Ketterdam as Kaz Brekker and his crew seek vengeance upon their enemies and struggle to free themselves from their demons, both past and present. Throughout their adventures, they avenge the moral failings of their city’s corrupt leaders and learn to better love themselves—and each other. At the same time, Crooked Kingdom explores the damage wrought by greed, shame, and prejudice.
The story is told in the third-person voice, rotating between accounts of events given by Kaz, Inej, Nina, Matthias, Wylan, and Jesper. This narrative structure weaves together each of the main characters’ perspectives and alternately spotlights each characters’ thoughts and interpretations, their current struggles, and their traumatic pasts. As outsiders in society, none of the gang has had a platform for respect or the ability to be heard the way their foes, like Van Eck, have enjoyed. Each gets to be the narrator of their individual story, and all of them thus claim a kind of power within a city that has often ostracized them. By interweaving different characters’ perspectives of each other, the novel presents a complex picture of each member of the gang, suggesting that each person is both self-determined and deeply influenced by those around them.
Each of the problems the team must solve forces them to hone skills they know they have, as well as new skills they might not recognize. At the same time, the challenges carry with them heavy tolls, endangering each character not only physically but emotionally. This is evident from the outset as the gang works to free Inej from Van Eck’s clutches. Inej must keep herself steady while in captivity and Kaz must do the same, as he routinely suppresses questions that elicit any emotions about Inej. The juxtaposition of the annoying, inane Alys with the clever, competent Inej—both valuable hostages to their respective families—throws into relief the different ways each woman is valued. Van Eck wants Alys for the baby she will produce, ignoring her babble about music and her pets. Meanwhile, Kaz values Inej not for what she can produce but for who she is, as his impassioned assertion that he’d have saved her no matter how broken she is makes clear.
The gang’s next major scheme relies on the powerful lure of greed, but its success also requires that each member of the gang confront change: Nina must use her dark powers, Wylan must reckon with his mother’s existence, and Inej is forced to consider her mortality. Inej had previously believed that using a net was a sign of weakness, undermining her confidence, but when she is attacked and nearly bested by Dunyasha, a net that Kaz insists on sending to Sugar Reef saves her life. The net, held by corpses that Nina figured out how to animate, not only stops an otherwise fatal fall, it also suggests to Inej that she can sometimes rely on things (and people) without diminishing herself or her abilities. Similarly, Wylan and Jesper travel to Saint Hilde and discover that Wylan is in an asylum, while Van Eck has told his son that his mother is dead. When he sees his mother alive, Wylan is overcome with righteous anger at his father, who also tried to have him killed. Faced with the cold, hard truth of his father’s ruthlessness and cruelty, Wylan begins to understand how wrong his father has always been about him, which is the impetus behind Wylan’s realization of his true power.
When the silo plot is foiled by Pekka Rollins, Dunyasha, and the Dime Lions in one masterful counterattack, Kaz and the gang retreat, wounded and defeated. Their scheme, which relied heavily on hiding and disguises, has been upended, their enemies are closing in on them, and hope seems lost. However, rather than continuing to hide, Kaz comes up with a plan to shed their disguises and stand fully revealed. By putting Kuwei up for a rigged auction, Kaz uses the merchant class’s corrupted values and rules as a weapon against them. He lures Van Eck to the table of the fake jurda consortium by using his colossal greed and belief in his own moral superiority against him. By showing themselves rather than hiding, the gang reclaims its own power and pushes back against the narrative that each of them are worthless young upstarts doomed to be crushed by the powers that be. Instead, the gang is a force to be reckoned with, and it creates a new reality both by playing by the Council’s rules and by making a few rules of its own.
The gang ultimately succeeds by fully embracing and utilizing each members’ powers. Kaz’s outrageous scheme depends, in other words, on his clear assessment of each member of his team. Kaz stands up as a leader in Ketterdam, both by reclaiming his rightful place as the head of the Dregs and by facing the Merchant Council in broad daylight as their equal. His skill is in scheming, and at every turn, from faking the Council of Tides to faking Kuwei’s death, he outsmarts Van Eck and every other enemy. Inej uses her skill as an acrobat, the lessons she learned from loved ones, and her knowledge of her new home in Ketterdam to outmaneuver Dunyasha and to smuggle Jesper’s gun to him. Jesper reclaims his Grisha power by making a shot around the corner, manipulating a bullet with a crucial consequence. And Wylan skillfully lies to his father, takes a beating, convinces the Council he can read, and makes his father seem insane, all of which would’ve been unthinkable to him at the beginning of the novel. Through facing the pain of their pasts, each character has reclaimed their persona.3
