Not quite Lynch-ian, but enjoyable.
I definitely get why it's compared to Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, as Easie Damasco is a thief with that sarcastic, self-deprecating, self-referential sense of humor; though here the action includes a large battle and contains gloriously ugly giants rather than inhabiting the various districts of an old city. You know you're off to a good start when in the first chapter the hero is being hanged. (Though I'm not sure why Angry Robot chose to whitewash the "olive brown" Easie Damasco in the cover art of book one and the just-released cover art for book two, Crown Thief, due out in October; it's sadly not an uncommon happening, thought in recent memory at least Night Shade corrected a similar issue after receiving a lot of negative feedback. C'mon, publishers. You can do better. You aren't adapting a film here. I hesitate to mention this at all, as I do not want people punishing the author of all people, which a "well, I'm not gonna buy that there book then" response does, and Tallerman is the wrong target. But I also don't want to be silent, so... there you go.) Back to the book: as the narrative stays in first person throughout, we see a bit more inside Damasco's head than we did into Locke Lamora's. However, even though Tallerman is not setting out to recreate a precocious group of Gentleman Bastards, Giant Thief is a step or two down from Lynch's excellent debut. We get bits and pieces of Damasco's back story, but never quite enough to build a solid idea of who he is or what he wants -- even if it is the now typical "thief just getting by and not really wanting much of anything or planning ahead" mold. The first half of the book has some quite nicely turned encounters -- Damasco's acquisition of the titular giant for example -- but the second half sees more and more improbable. Even for a book which asks its reader to accept the existence of talking giants, the plot turns on points which verge on the illogical, demanding that the reader unlearn what they have learned about characters and competencies up to that point. However! There's still something fun about a book which doesn't take itself too seriously. On the audiobook: The narration overall really fits the tone, though at times it strays just over into too much sarcastic detachment, where the curtain parts just a bit too much and you feel the acting.