Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Mask of Mirrors | 2021 | M.A. Carrick | Buy |
| 2 | The Liar’s Knot | 2021 | M.A. Carrick | Buy |
| 3 | Labyrinth’s Heart | 2023 | M.A. Carrick | Buy |
The Rook and Rose trilogy opens in Nadezra, a city where two cultures live in uneasy and often violent proximity: the Liganti colonisers who control the upper city, and the Vraszenian people whose land was taken. Ren is Vraszenian by blood but was raised as a thief and con artist, and she arrives in Nadezra with a plan to infiltrate a noble house under a false identity. She also operates under a second false identity — as the masked vigilante the Rook — and a third, as a reader of pattern-cards who may have genuine prophetic gift. The Mask of Mirrors (2021) sets up this triple life and the supernatural threat of nightmare, a spreading corruption that no one has yet identified as a single problem.
The series is notable for the density and precision of its plotting. Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms planned all three books before writing, which allowed them to build the trilogy as a single interlocking structure: details that seem like atmosphere in book one are load-bearing by book three. Reviewers have consistently described the series as among the most intricately constructed fantasies of recent years, with The Liar’s Knot and Labyrinth’s Heart (2023) delivering on promises made across hundreds of pages. The city itself — its canal system, its factions, its overlapping magical traditions — feels as fully realised as any city in secondary-world fantasy.
The Mask of Mirrors was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten SF/F and Horror Debuts. All three books are published by Orbit.