Best Served Cold

Author – Joe Abercrombie

Trade Paperback
Pages: 544 pages
Publisher: Gollancz
Release Date: June 1st, 2009
ISBN-10: 0575082453
ISBN-13: 978-0575082458

You can say many things for Joe Abercrombie.

You can say he’s leading the way for no-holds-barred Fantasy. You can say he’s a great stylist, with satisfying, easy-to-read prose. You can give him credit for being adept at writing convincing, startling endings (a trait sadly lacking in the Fantasy genre). You can say his action scenes are among the best out there. You can say he loves to set the reader up, then pull the rug out from under them by subverting the tropes we all know and abhor/love.

You can say all these things about Joe Abercrombie, and they all certainly apply to Best Served Cold as surely as they did for his first trilogy, The First Law. I recognized all of these qualities while reading the novel, but the whole time I also couldn’t fight the feeling that something was off, that I wasn’t connecting to this Abercrombie novel as I had to previous ones. It took me a few days, and a couple of conversations with others who had read the book, to finally unearth the roots of this feeling.
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