Best Served Cold

Another great Abercrombie book. All in all, I'd say that it's not quite as good in total as his First Law trilogy, but the writing, characterization, etc is still just as good as anything I've read of his.

The general gist is a revenge story, and not many can tell that story better than Abercrombie. Monza Murcatto narrowly survives a betrayal and assassination, and sets out to kill the 7 people involved. She enlists a band of "friends" (though only one is Friendly) and through intricate machinations works her way through a hit list. Think Tarantino movie, with a dash of some Coen brothers capers.

Things I loved:

• Abercrombie writes phenomenally distinct and interesting characters. The entire cast is a delight, particularly famed soldier of fortune Nicomo Cosca and poisoner Castor Morveer. Many of them had interesting, sometimes intersecting, character arcs as their experiences change them.
• The fight scenes are phenomenal--gritty, realistic (by the standards of the genre) and sometimes even funny.
• A great smattering of reveals and reversals that never felt unearned, and always made for a more interesting story.
• The back half of the book accelerated and was hard to put down! Plans crash into each other, things went wrong, new information emerged--this is where it started to feel like a caper movie.

Things that I didn't love:

• This is par for the course with Abercrombie, but there were some pretty significant scenes of brutality, torture, etc that had me putting the book down for a few weeks to read something lighter. Be warned! My personal, very subjective, opinion too is that in one of these cases, a character's changed outlook made them much less interesting.
• The various assassinations, while never the same (not really even close to the same), started to feel like settling into a routine after the first few. This changed closer to the end as more things started to go sideways.

Overall a 3.5 / 5 for me -- great and definitely worth a read.