Temporal Instability

I raced through this book in very little time, considering that I listened to it while working. The fact that it took me only 2 days, says something about the quality.
First the good:
The audiobook is very well narrated by Michael Page. He really voiceacts and has a good pleasant voice/accent (to my ears). His voice reminded me of Johnny Depp. It is just perfect for this book. Publishers undervalue the importance of a good voice for an audiobook, often they are low quality and boring.

The plot is nice, but not surprising.
As I said in the in between updates: the world reminds me of the book Cyrion (compilation of stories by Tanith Lee). However, Cyrion made more of an impression on me as a "brilliant" thief/conman. The tone of Lies is light and tasty. Easy to digest. Intriguing enough to want to keep reading. It got me hooked from the first 'page' (audiobook again). That's a big plus.

The character of Locke is mysterious and captivating, and we don't get to know much about him in this first book. Not enough for my taste. There are large gaps in his history. He is charming, clever and a loyal friend. The dialog between the characters is snappy and full of catching one-liners.


The bad.
Now, I'm reading a lot of rave reviews on this book here on Good Reads. It certainly is a good book, but I don't think it deserves the 4 and a bit star rating. All through the book you read how brilliant Locke is, but frankly, he isn't. The "twists" are not that clever, I don't even get a real 'con-men' feel of his crew. They are thieves, clever thieves, but nothing special. Telling readers over and over that something is very clever of even brilliant doesn't make it so. I expected to be suprised, and I unfortunately wasn't.
Maybe I'm spoiled in my taste. I'm an avid fan of the tv-series "Hustle", "Sherlock" or "Coupling". Those are tvseries, but for a plot it doesn't differ much from a book. They all do twists, mysteries or cons a lot better/more clever than this book.
The humor in the book is nice, but not the ROFL kind. More 'smile' than 'laugh'. The humor is refined, which suites me just fine.

For my books I look for a writer to live up to the Steven Erikson standard... and Scott Lynch just doesn't. Not in cleverness/plot. Not in character development.

This is not to say I didn't like the book, because i absolutely did. I will read the sequel and look forward to the forthcoming third book. It's a nice light snack for reading inbetween my heavier books. And I love it for that.

(Pardon me for my english, it's not my native language.)