This was SoC lite version. Honestly it was way too close to SoC and in a very distasteful way. We have Arthie who is supposed to be a mastermind criminal and Laith who can climb very high walls, Jin who is a charmer, Matteo who is a vampire and keeps on saying Darling (that is the only thing he has going on and oh he also roams around half naked) and Flick who is from a highborn family and has fraught relationship with her mother. I do not have to tell you who is what in comparison to SoC! 

I did enjoy some parts of the book, but overall I was eye rolling hard. It was all tell and no-show. Everyone in the book was just worshiping the ground that Arthie walked and I just couldn’t understand why. If you keep using the word secrets so much and keep on writing about how Arthie knows everyone’s secrets and trades with them, then the action starts losing its novelty. I started getting irritated by Arthie towards the end with the way the three men were just swooning as if even the way she takes breath is outwardly or something.

I didn’t hate the characters necessarily but honestly if they were written as less than perfect and shown more flaws then they would have been more interesting. Instead we have a bunch of characters who have no depth and some sobbing backstory that is somehow supposed to make us relatable to them but massively fails to do so. I cannot even say the book was character driven because all I can say about them is that they had a messy childhood. 

I won’t say much about plot because heists go way above my head. I only like the high stakes part in a heist book. But here, not even the stakes were high. Arthie took a job from someone she has never met or heard about, her planning wasn’t even that grand because when the heist started it looked liked she went into it blindly, nothing was going wrong in a massive way, the twists and turns were convenient, mistrust was forced upon unnecessarily so better option was to show camaraderie but unfortunately in that front too we get nothing, guards were stupid, the supposedly high alert and well protected event wasn’t even protected that well etc etc. 

Also this is my first time reading about vampires who are so so stupid. I thought they had heightened senses so how can they possibly miss even minutest sounds when the said sounds were happening in the same room as they were?! How can they not catch a human running away? What are these new species of weak vampires? 

But nonetheless, I am really hoping that 2nd book will be better.