Den of Liars
Den of Liars (The Devious #1)
By: Jessica S. Olson
[Fulfilled ‘A book with a curse’ prompt as part of Shelf Reflection’s 2025 Reading Challenge]
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2025]
“Secrets are meant to be shared, not stolen. Just like hearts.”
“I am too valuable, my heritage too dangerous, my existence a live wire ready to catch flame.”
True to Jessica Olson’s writing, this was a compelling, hard-to-put-down, creative and magical story about truth and lies, curses and freedoms, love and control. Two cursed brothers and the girl that stands between them, discovering what is true and what is hers.
Olson has such a great imagination when it comes to creating worlds and ways of using magic.
Her debut, Sing Me Forgotten, connects magic to music.
Her second book, A Forgery of Roses, infuses painting with magic. [See also The Artist of Blackberry Grange]
With Den of Liars, she pits magics against each other in the form of enemy brothers with different curses/abilities and a competition held in a magic-saturated casino.
In all three books Olson showcases the isolation, the dangers, and the secrets of magic that affect relationships.
With each book there is also an element of love/romance. Sing Me Forgotten has a sweet, more gentle, loyal and melodic love. A Forgery of Roses focuses more on a murder mystery and the love is a secondary thread. With Den of Liars, we almost have two different love triangles, but not really even that (you’ll see). The love in this book is also more about its forbiddenness. A rougher, tricky, and painful love.
Unlike her first two books, this is the first of some sort of series so the story is just beginning, the depths of the magic yet to be discovered.
I have really enjoyed her books and am always checking to see when her next book is coming out. Hopefully we don’t have to wait too long for the next one in this series!
Plot Summary/Basics
(In a book like this there is so much background and set-up to understand the world and the terms)
The two male characters of this story are the brothers: The Liar (Nic) and The Thief (Enzo).
“Five years ago, Enzo and his brother, the Liar, stole an extraordinarily powerful hunk of magicked voratium called a moonshard from Aethera’s holy zenithic temple. That same night, his brother turned on him, wielding the moonshard to curse Enzo. Since then, Enzo’s been trying to get his hands on the moonshard, following lead after lead, searching for the secret location where his brother has stowed it.”
Because of that fateful night both brothers are cursed— one to be unable to tell the truth, and one to require stealing in order to survive.
“Though that curse gave Enzo the ability to walk through any wall and enter any safe, it also took away his capacity to feel, to speak, to be. In order to say words, he must first steal them from someone else’s mouth. In order to have emotions, he must first take them from someone else’s heart. In order to be corporeal, he must first pilfer physical form from someone else’s existence.”
Our main female character is Lola (Magnolia St. James). When she was fifteen she was kidnapped. Then Enzo rescued her from her kidnappers under the condition that she willingly ‘gives him’ her heart— a magical connection that allows Enzo to feel and to access things from her being so he has to steal less.
She accepted the terms and her and Enzo became connected.
“When he turns, so do I. When I leap, he does, too. We may only share a heart, but after four years of heists and training, we may as well share a body, a mind, a soul.”
Up until her kidnapping, her childhood was one of isolation. Her father was the most infamous crime boss in the city.
“All my life, I was his little secret. A weapon, stored away for her own protection until the day she would take her father’s place”
When she learned that her father never searched for her or cared once she was kidnapped, her concept of love, truth, and trust was shattered.
“That was when I learned the difference between the lies told to protect the ones you love and the lies told to make a person think that’s what you’re doing.”
Thus began her four year stint working in tandem with Enzo to help find the moonshard that would free him from his curse.
And that is essentially where we begin the book: their search for the moonshard has led them to steal something from the Liar’s casino— The Liar’s Den— that will give them another clue to its location.
The Liar magicked the casino to not allow the Thief (or his magic) into the casino. Lola goes in to retrieve the object, gets caught, and finds herself basically forced to participate in the Liar’s annual and well-known game.
“Fifty contestants, gambling their most dangerous secrets over several rounds of challenges for the chance to win a single die with the power to sow one untraceable deception.”
In fact, this game was the catalyst for her plight; four years ago her father entered, bargaining the secret of her existence. He lost and she was exposed, then kidnapped in order to hurt her father’s business.
Lola’s hatred for the casino and the Liar behind it grows deep.
Winning this competition would not only allow her access to the Liar’s secrets and the location of the moonshard, but the ability to win a lie that she could use for revenge.
“I fully intend to use the shard to destroy the Liar and his precious casino. Destroy it like it destroyed me.”
But a wrench is thrown into her reality when she discovers the Liar may not be who he shows himself to be. Even though Enzo warned her not to trust anything she sees, smells, taste, hears, or feels while surrounded by Nic’s magic, she encounters something that rings very much like the truth and causes her to question everything.
Ultimately, this story is a quest for both truth and freedom.
What I Liked
I liked the concept of the main competition/game. I thought it was just going to be one big Liar’s Dice competition, but Olson gives the game a twist. Traditional Liar’s Dice definitely has a place in the competition, but the bulk of the competition revolves around each contestant receiving a mark and a lie they must convince their mark to believe.
They are allowed a choice of seven magical dice from a selection of dice with varying powers to help with their deception. Dice that create visual glamours, affect their other senses, soften their emotions, or make truths feel false. They get to choose any combination and they get a new selection with each round they complete.
It’s always complex to read about competitions that challenges your morals and forces you to make choices that hurt people. And that’s a main thread in this game— that lying hurts people.
They go so far to say that lying is equated to violence. I’m not a big fan of words being called violence because of the implications, but I do agree with the claim that lying is harmful to people even if they don’t know they are being lied to.
So this competition creates a framework for Lola to explore this dichotomy of truth and lies and challenge her reality.
“‘Lies hurt people,’ Nic growls back. ‘Because they imprison them.’
’Better imprisoned than dead.’
His eyes flash. ‘Spoken like someone who has never been imprisoned.’
’Spoken like someone,’ I retort, ‘who has never watched someone die.’”
The importance of truth in this book is probably my favorite part (other than just the imaginative and well-written world).
Lola is confronted with the possibility that something she’s believed for a long time might actually be a lie. That is a heavy, heavy moment with so many implications.
“‘If you’ve devoted yourself fully to a particular idea, the suggestion it might be false is as terrifying as an attacking assassin. Only the most courageous people are willing to look that in the face and not fear its wielded blades.’
’How can you tell if you’ve landed on what’s real? How can anyone ever be sure of anything?’
’Truth holds up. You can question it, you can dig at it, and it will continue to be true, no matter how you feel about it.’”
“The truth does not have to be protected. It simply is.”
The book is not trying to make any claims about ultimate truth or religion in the real world (I don’t think), but the principles it claims still applies to statements of faith. In today’s world there is an attack on objective truth. There is a cultural ideology that tries to say everyone can have their own truth, truth is determined by feelings, or that we can’t really know what is true. Somehow they feel like objective truth is binding and we can’t have that.
But the reality is that truth is freedom. And like the above quote shows— it holds up. This is a sentence I could say about my faith in Christ and the veracity of his Word. It holds up. You can question it and dig at it, but it has stood the test of time. I don’t have to protect God from my or others’ questions. He is unchanging, unlike feelings. The truth will shine through, simply because it can’t be anything else. It just is.
It was cool to see this eternal truth embedded in this fictional story. Because that eternal truth about God and truth affects all areas of our life, including our identity. Including our definitions of love and trust and freedom. We see the importance of truth in the lives of these characters when so much of their life is subterfuge and glamourized, magicked to deceive. Our ability to discern truth is paramount to our identities. Truth matters.
Do we have the courage to look at what we believe and dig at it, question it, and allow the truth to reign supreme? Don’t fear the blades that cut away the lies.
Another thing I liked that I didn’t realize I almost didn’t get, was Nic’s POV. Jessica reveals in the author’s note that one of her people suggested including his POV. One of the earlier drafts of the book must have just been Lola’s perspective.
I’m glad they made the change to include Nic’s POV because it adds emotional complexity. We don’t get Enzo’s POV but because Lola's and his hearts are shared, we do get some of his feelings through her.
As reality becomes more convoluted in the book, Nic’s POV is grounding. Enzo becomes the enigma. With Nic’s chapters we find out early on part of his identity as the Liar:
“I’m getting tired, so tired of it all. Of the guilt for what my actions have turned Enzo into, the shame for what the moonshard has done to the girl I once loved, the horror of becoming what I swore I never would… I was not a monster. But I would be if it would protect Enzo from what else that moonshard might do to him. If it would protect Laurel from what he might do to get it from her. And so, with the frigid power in my veins, I became the monster I swore I never would.”
And all of a sudden we as readers can’t feel indifferent to both of the brothers. We don’t fully know the ways they have been perpetrators or victims. We just know that we don’t have all the information.
I like that with Nic’s chapters we get another perspective on what it’s like to lie or to deal in secrets. To feel the tension of not knowing if you’re hurting or helping. And we get a glimpse into what lengths a person might go to to protect people they love. That’s always a crowd-pleaser.
Another heavy topic this book speaks into are toxic and controlling relationships. I won’t say a lot on this and let the two quotes speak for themselves, but I like that Lola is finding her way into herself and autonomy to live outside of someone’s control.
“Relationships are not about supervision or regulation; they’re about trust.”
“If anyone ever tells you to distrust everyone but them, they aren’t interested in truth. Only control.”
How great, if this book were able to help a reader identify a relationship they have allowed to control them and seek help to get out of an abusive situation!
What I Didn’t Like
Actually, there’s not much to not like here. If I had to come up with something I may say that some of Lola’s attitude towards Nic started to make less sense once she discovered that he literally can’t tell the truth about a lot of things because of his curse. It’s not like he’s deciding not to trust her, he literally can’t say certain things.
But she seemed to not have grace for that but makes angry assumptions that even if he could tell the truth that he wouldn’t. So some of her emotions toward him seem a little unfair. But… at the same time… he did run a contest that ruined her life so that would definitely cloud her judgment and one week of interactions can’t just undo all of those feelings.
So yeah, just a minor thing.
My Predictions
There are probably some sort of spoiler in here so I wouldn’t read this section until you’ve read the book.
I am convinced that Estelle is Laurel. She won the tournament last year— what did she use her lie to do? Does it keep people from knowing her true identity? Or is she just connected to Laurel and helping her. We didn’t get any answer on Estelle’s deal in this book so I’m guessing that will be a big part of the next book.
I am looking forward to her next interaction with her father. He is still a crime lord so I’m not entirely sure what kind of relationship they can have, but I predict that her father will do something to save her later in the series.
I am also predicting that Laurel might actually be the ultimate villain and that somehow the brothers will unite forces with Lola and they will all three take on Laurel and whatever power she was infused with because of the moonshard. I think Nic and Lola will probably end up together so in order to make the reader not feel bad for Laurel, I think Laurel is going to do something evil so we’re okay that her and Nic are over.
Another thing that wasn’t revealed in the book was what Ostena’s lie was. The Liar opted not to show everyone. But we know he had some sort of reaction to it, so it must be a big deal. I’m assuming that will also play a part in the next book. Who is Ostena and what is she up to? Maybe she’s actually Lola’s sister and neither of them knew about each other. That’s kinda a wild guess and probably not true, but I’m out here predicting so…
What’s Next
“I need answers. About who I am and what I am, about what happened the night that moonshard cursed these brothers, and what it has to do with me. About what my father knows and what exactly Enzo plans to do with the moonshard once he gets his hands on it. I need the truth. And if neither of the Devious will give it to me, then I will have to become the game master, the ringleader, and the puppeteer myself.”
One last thing. I don’t have Instagram so I’m not sure if this link is going to work right, but I found this post Olson had that shares artwork of Lola, Enzo, and Nic if you want a visual of how she pictures them.
Recommendation
Jessica Olson writes such compelling and creative stories that she’s is inching her way up as a favorite author to read when I’m looking for something fantasy/magical. I could see future books becoming spicier, but hopefully this book is as spicy as it gets or I might have to rethink it.
I definitely recommend this book and her two previous ones I already mentioned!
If you’re looking for another book with a thief that enters a competition, check out the Thieves Gambit series. They are YA books (no magic) that have similar themes and moral dilemmas and an enemies-to-lover trope.
[Content Advisory: 0 f-words, 3 s-words, 1 b-word, 45 d-words; chapter 35 is probably the spiciest scene- it’s mostly lusty foreplay and then they get interrupted before anything graphic happens or any clothes come off]
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
This book just published in July, 2025. You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.
Share this book review to your social media!