The Gilded Wolves
A brilliant thief assembles a diverse team to pull off an impossible heist across 1889 Paris and beyond. The stakes are impossibly high, the treasures are priceless, and the chemistry between her crew crackles with tension and secrets. History, mythology, and romance collide as they race against time and their enemies.
Everything You Need to Know About The Gilded Wolves
Paris, 1889. The Exposition Universelle is drawing crowds, and underneath the spectacle the four Houses of the Order of Babel guard Forging, a magic that lets people bend matter and mind. Severin Montagnet-Alarie owns a glittering hotel and hunts treasure on the side. He was supposed to inherit House Vanth. The Order took it from him, and when they need something stolen back, he agrees on one condition: his inheritance.
His crew is a group of people the Order would never invite to dinner. Laila, a dancer from Bombay who can read the history of any object she touches. Enrique, a Filipino Spanish historian nobody in the academy will publish. Zofia, a Polish Jewish engineer pushed out of university, brilliant with numbers and fire. Tristan, Severin's foster brother, a botanist happier with his tarantula than with people. Hypnos, heir to House Nyx, lonely and unwelcome in his own circle. The heist runs on riddles, mathematics and forged artifacts, and the book cares as much about who gets to own history as it does about what sits in the vault.
The crew banter is the point, and each of them gets a distinct register, Zofia's literal precision against Enrique's showmanship against Hypnos's neediness. The Forging system is used for actual solvable puzzles instead of vague power levels, so the heist sequences reward paying attention. And the book keeps asking who the museum belongs to, which is not a question most 1889 Paris fantasies bother to raise.
Violence and murder, on-page death of a major character, grief. Antisemitism, racism and colonial exploitation are depicted and interrogated rather than used as scenery. Some body horror in sequences involving Forged objects.
Tristan dies at the end, and it lands as senseless rather than heroic. The final chapter switches to Hypnos, where the matriarch of House Kore tells him Severin cannot sit the inheritance test at all, because he is not the heir to House Vanth. Severin goes into book two not knowing this, which is the engine the rest of the trilogy runs on.
This is the found family heist crowd's less obvious pick, with real puzzles rather than vibes. If Six of Crows is your comfort read, this is the closest thing with a Belle Epoque setting and a much sharper interest in colonialism and who gets credited for knowledge. It is YA, low on spice, and the plot moves in riddles, so readers who want a clean romantic throughline may bounce off. The cast is large and Chokshi does not slow down to introduce them twice.
Book one of a trilogy, followed by The Silvered Serpents and The Bronzed Beasts. It does not stand alone. The last chapter is a gut punch and a setup at the same time, and you will want book two immediately.
Reader Reviews
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!