League of Liars
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In this fantasy thriller, four teens charged with murder and caught up with the illegal use of magic band together to devise the ultimate jailbreak. Perfect for fans of Six of Crows and How to Get Away with Murder.
Ever since his mother was killed, seventeen-year-old Cayder Broduck has had one goal—to see illegal users of magic brought to justice. People who carelessly use extradimensional magic for their own self-interest, without a care to the damage it does to society or those around them, deserve to be punished as far as Cayder is concerned. Because magic always has a price. So when Cayder lands a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to apprentice under a premier public defender, he takes it. If he can learn all the tricks of public defense, the better he’ll be able to dismantle defense arguments when he’s a prosecutor. Then he’ll finally be able to make sure justice is served.
But when he meets the three criminals he’s supposed to defend, it no longer seems so black and white. They’re teenagers, like him, and their stories are . . . complicated, like his. Vardean, the prison where Cayder’s new clients are incarcerated, also happens to be at the very heart of the horrible tear in the veil between their world and another dimension—where all magic comes from.
League of Liars is a dark and twisty mystery set in a richly-drawn world where nothing is as it seems, rife with magic, villains and danger.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The use of edem—a shadowy magic that seeps from an extradimensional tear, allowing one to "manipulate time and change your reality"—is forbidden in Telene, its practitioners hunted down by the secretive government agency Regency and imprisoned in the prison Vardean. Against this backdrop, 17-year-old Cayder Broduck knows precisely where he wants to end up in life: as a public prosecutor for the Crown Court, putting away magic users like the one who killed his mother. Meanwhile, his 16-year-old sister Leta spirals into an obsession with edem. Cayder believes his apprenticeship with a leading public defender will help accelerate his nascent legal career, until he encounters his first client: charming, allegedly patricidal 18-year-old Jey. Reserved 17-year-old Elenora soon joins his caseload, and, to his horror, so does Leta, having been accused of a terrible offense. As he delves into the events leading up to their crimes, Cayder realizes that there is much more to edem, and even to the Regency, than he has always thought. Scholte (The Vanishing Deep) blends legal thriller and action novel in an exploration of morality's gray areas. Though the plot occasionally lacks tension, a mix of first- and third-person perspectives lend depth to the cast, which includes biracial, brown-skinned, white, and queer characters. Ages 12–up.
