Foundryside should be right up my alley as a fantasy heist story, but it just didn't click for me. Sancia is a very good thief in the city of Tevanne, heart of an empire built on magic called scrivings. Scrivings alter the rules of reality, convincing a cart that it is rolling downhill, or a forge that it is red hot with no fuel. Sancia's edge is that due to horrific experiments, she can hear scrivings and has a sixth sense that lets her find weaknesses in buildings. She's hired to steal a small item from a safe for a king's ransome, and the item turns out to be an ancient sentient artifact, a key that can open anything. A bunch of people want her dead, and Sancia has to find unlikely allies to survive.

There is some good thieving and characterization, but much of the supporting work of the book falls flat. The setting isn't nearly as weird as it deserves to be, just of cyberpunk gloss on renaissance fantasy. The plot was too slow to develop, and at a sentence to sentence level the writing swung between pedestrian and groan-worthy. It's a shame, since I loved Bennett's other books, but Foundryside is pretty middle of the road.