Holy Terrors Offers a Chaotic, Thoroughly Satisfying Conclusion to Margaret Owen’s Little Thieves Trilogy

Most readers don’t have to think too hard to name a series whose ending didn’t quite stick the landing. Whether its story doesn’t exactly manage to wrap up all the dangling plot threads, a beloved character dies, or the promised final showdown just isn’t as thrilling as we were led to believe it would be, more trilogies than we’d like to admit wrap up with more of a whimper than a bang. This is a shame for many reasons, not the least of which is that few things are as joyous or satisfying to a reader as a truly well-done ending. So it’s a relief to confirm that Holy Terrors, the third and final installment in Margaret Owen’s delightful Little Thieves trilogy, not only manages to give readers a satisfying conclusion to heroine Vanya Schmidt’s story but offers a heartfelt love letter to the power of stories to shape who we are. 

To be clear: Holy Terrors is a lot. A doorstopper of a final installment, it’s longer than both other books in the series and will require you to remember a great deal of what’s come before. Characters from the first novel not only appear again in this one, they also play key roles in the sequel’s larger story. Vanja’s emotional arc is grounded in the trauma she’s spent the entire series grappling with, and her relationships with almost everyone she interacts with are colored by pages and years of story. To Owen’s credit, she handles the many competing emotional and narrative threads of Holy Terrors with a deft hand, intertwining its multiple pieces into a satisfying whole even as she explores what might have been had her heroine made different choices at the key crossroads (often literal) of her life. The result is a lushly written exploration of power, forgiveness, and self-acceptance that brings almost every aspect of this story perfectly full circle. 

The story picks up sixteen months after Vanja returned from the sojourn with the Wild Hunt that concluded Painted Devils. In the interim, she’s given in to her ever-present commitment issues, abandoned the love of her life (though she insists leaving Emeric behind was for the prefect’s own good), and fully take up the mantle of the Pfennigeist, the phantom vigilante who punishes those the law can’t reach—or isn’t particularly concerned with stopping. But her alter ego has taken on a strange life of its own, and as she struggles to control her unpredictable new abilities, Vanja learns that a series of royals across the empire have been turning up dead with her signature red penny in their mouths. To clear her name, Vanja will have to confront her past, which means not only working with Emeric, but reevaluating every assumption she’s made about her previous choices and the life she’s chosen to lead. 

Forced to infiltrate the election of a new empress to try and suss out the murderer behind these crimes, our heroine is reunited with old friends and hated foes. Meanwhile, a complex political plot with the future of the kingdom at stake unspools in the background, as seven royal families argue about succession and power, all with the literal fate of reality itself hanging in the balance. (And no small amount of additional murders.) But it is the angst and antagonism shimmering between Vanja and Emeric that drives the emotional arc of much of the novel’s early going, before morphing into a broader exploration of free will and the meaning of justice.