Phrai joins a crew to pull off a dangerous heist.
Little do her fellow thieves know that the end of their job is just the beginning of hers.

I picked up ‘A Wolf In Thief’s Clothing‘ because it had a clever title, a stylish cover and offered a quick way of sampling Lily Anne Crow’s fantasy world of Erlahain.

Lily Anne Crow packs a lot into this sixty-four pages. The story immediately drops the reader in the moment when a heist being run by a young team of thieves against a corrupt local official starts to go badly wrong. Just when everything seems lost, the story winds back and we get the background to how our heroine, Phrai, hooked up with the crew. From that point on, this is a heist story with a twist. We get a convincing overview of the planning and execution of the heist but with the knowledge that it will go wrong and that Phrai has an agenda she hasn’t shared with the rest of the team.

The plot was clever enough to keep me guessing. The atmosphere was tense and the action scenes worked. The scene where Phrai gets involved in a gambling session was nicely done. I liked the details of how the game of Ships worked.

The writing at the start of the book was a bit adjective-laden for my tastes but that settled down once we reached the dialogue and the action took off.

There wasn’t much world-building, I think the assumption was that everyone was familiar with Erlahain, but there was enough for me to visualise the action.

If you like your fantasy fast, clever and mischievous, then you may enjoy a visit to Erlahain.