![]() ![]() His characters are extremely interesting, highly flawed, sometimes self aware, and often quite amusing. Don’t get me wrong, these are pretty serious books, but the tone is a bit ironic. He has a particular style, full of stylistic word repeats, witty turns, and a sort of darkly comic tone. All this makes the stakes fairly high.Ībercrombie is also a very good prose smith. What magic there is is mostly used for disguise, or more often as more amped up lethal methods of slayage. This is also fantasy without a ton of life saving, healing, resurrecting magic. The only thing you can expect is a bit of the unexpected. His protagonists take a beating - again literally - and come out worse for the wear (if sometimes swift recovering). Each battle has its clever turns and reversals. He doesn’t spare you the crunch of bone, the spray of blood, but makes it seem very accurate and visceral. He has a particular knack for blow by blow combat - literarily. He loves both sieges (all four of his books I’ve read feature them), duels, and melees. ![]() ![]() In fact, one of the great pleasures of Abercrombie is his strength at describing combat. This is very adult fantasy with its share of graphic sex and a whole lot of gritty violence. None of the main characters or plot from that larger work appear in this novel, but a whole host of minor characters do, often in much expanded roles and the overall style and tone are very similar.įirst a note about that. Best Served Cold is a stand alone fantasy set in the same world as his more ambitious First Law trilogy. ![]()
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