Best Served Cold

Joe Abercrombie follows his First Law Trilogy with the stand-alone Best Served Cold, a novel of revenge, political intrigue, and interesting characters set in a rich and diverse fantasy world. The world is the same as the First Law, and minor characters from the first narrative appear and disappear throughout this novel, but you needn’t have read the first three books to read this one. The setup reads like a typical revenge/adventure story, but having read Abercrombie’s earlier work, I knew it wouldn’t be quite so simple.

Imagine taking Tolkein’s epic world, focusing on one small part of one fragmented kingdom in an area that two great powers are struggling over, adding Quentin Tarantino’s eye for the dramatic and his gift for dialogue, sprinkling George R. R. Martin’s ability to write living, breathing characters, and finally adding a dash of black, gallows-style humor. Shake it well, make sure that none of the characters could truly be heroic by any definition, and then tell a revenge story that is anything but typical. That, in essence, is Best Served Cold.

I’ll admit that the plot meanders a bit toward the end; the book could have gotten away with being about forty thousand words shorter, but the characters in it are just so damned interesting that you probably won’t notice. The characters range from the female mercenary general who was left for dead by a jealous employer, a barbarian soldier/killer who is trying to be an optimist, a drunken ex-general, or a scary little serial killer with a penchant for numbers. Their stories are interwoven with a deft hand, but don’t mistake this for an epic fantasy. Rather, this is blunt, brutal, and gritty. Things don’t come together for the good of the characters, and the results are often ironic, if not mind-numbling “oh my God, I shouldn’t be laughing” hilarious. Abercromibe succeeds in giving such distinct voices to the characters that I would swear that it was really them writing their own autobiographies. I can think of no one else who nails this aspect in the writing as well.

Abercromie has really struck a nerve with me. I discovered him via the Amazon “related authors” search when I was browsing for Scott Lynch’s next book in the Locke Lamora series, and I’m glad that I did. There are very few authors that I’ll buy books from site-unseen or without some reviews to back them up, and Joe Abercrombie is on that list. Start with The Blade Itself and work your way through the trilogy. You won’t be disappointed.