The Curse Workers

About The Curse Workers

In Cassel Sharpe's world, a small fraction of people are "workers" -- able to curse others with a touch, transforming luck, memory, emotion, even physical form -- which is exactly why working of any kind has been illegal for a century and why organized crime families, Cassel's own included, are built entirely around it. Cassel is the only non-worker in a family of con artists and curse workers, or so he believes, and he's spent years quietly positioning himself as the closest thing to normal in his family -- until he starts sleepwalking, and wakes up with no memory of what he's done, and a mounting suspicion that everything he believes about himself is a lie someone else constructed.

Holly Black builds a fully realized alternate America here -- Prohibition-style organized crime but for magic, gloves worn everywhere as a social nicety since touch is dangerous, a con-artist family dynamic that runs on genuine affection and constant betrayal in equal measure. Cassel is a first-person narrator worth spending three books with: a talented liar and con artist in his own right, whose unreliable narration and self-deception are as much the mystery as the actual plot.

It's a sharp, twisty urban-fantasy heist trilogy for readers who want Black's talent for morally grey protagonists applied to a mobster-magic alternate history rather than a faerie court.

How to read this series

Read White Cat, Red Glove, and Black Heart in publication order. It's one continuous mystery-heist plot following Cassel's unraveling memory and family con, so the books build directly on each other and should be read in sequence.

No prior Holly Black reading is required -- this trilogy is set in its own alternate-America magic system, entirely separate from her faerie-court books.