Book Review :: The Devil’s Thief by Lisa Maxwell

The Devil's Thief by Lisa Maxwell
ISBN: 1481494457
Series: The Last Magician #2
Also in this series: The Last Magician
Published by Simon Pulse
on 2018-10-09
Genres: Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Young Adult
Pages: 704
Goodreads

Hunt the Stones. Beware the Thief. Avenge the Past.

Esta’s parents were murdered. Her life was stolen. And everything she knew about magic was a lie. She thought the Book of Mysteries held the key to freeing the Mageus from the Order’s grasp, but the danger within its pages was greater than she ever imagined.

Now the Book’s furious power lives inside Harte. If he can’t control it, it will rip apart the world to get its revenge, and it will use Esta to do it.

To bind the power, Esta and Harte must track down four elemental stones scattered across the continent. But the world outside the city is like nothing they expected. There are Mageus beyond the Brink not willing to live in the shadows—and the Order isn’t alone in its mission to crush them.

In St. Louis, the extravagant World’s Fair hides the first stone, but an old enemy is out for revenge and a new enemy is emerging. And back in New York, Viola and Jianyu must defeat a traitor in a city on the verge of chaos.

As past and future collide, time is running out to rewrite history—even for a time-travelling thief.

Last updated on 14 October 2023

This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase with one of these links, I recieve a small commission at no additional cost to you. Read the full Affiliate Policy.

My thoughts on The Devil’s Thief

It took me way too long to read this book; over a month! It wasn’t that it was bad – in fact I enjoyed it! – but I think it was more to do with the fact that I spent nearly two weeks overseas and I barely read anything, and that fact that it was so long, and that I was in a bit of a reading slump. It didn’t make me want to keep reading it in desperation to find out what happened like the first in this series, The Last Magician, did.

“True power was the ability to bend others to your will while they thought the bending was their own idea.”

The story picked up right where it left off in the The Last Magician which was both good and bad at the same time. Good because it ended with a bang in the last book, but bad because I couldn’t quite remember what happened, as I read the book last year. After a chapter or so I was right back into it. The plot is fast paced, ever moving and twisting and turning. There is a jump in this book to the future (you may recall me mentioning that the ‘magic’ in these books take the form of different affinities for different people, and the main character,  Esta, can change time) which does get a little jarring at times and there was a story line in 1902 that I didn’t really care for and would have rather followed the one in 1904 for the whole book. But it did all merge and match up quite nicely at the end. Having said that, there are a bucket load of POVs, and that definitely drags out the book a lot. If there had been less POVs it would have been more enjoyable, I think.

While it did take me a while, and I actually paused on it for a week while I picked up another book, I did enjoy it. Magic in these books is really cool, and I love the rules and the limitations that Maxwell has set in place. The third book doesn’t have a title or a release date yet, but I will be reading it; hopefully it doesn’t take me a month to do so!

Have you read The Devil’s Thief? What about The Last Magician?