Best Served Cold - Joe Abercrombie
Of all of Abercrombie's books prior to the Age Of Madness trilogy (which I haven't read at the time of writing) this is the one I remembered the least about. Having now re-read it for the first time since publication I think that's mainly because I didn't really love it.
Joe's prose is always great and he writes a good action scene. There's certainly nothing to dislike here, hence the 3 star rating. But especially when reading it immediately off the back of the First Law trilogy, it's hard to come away from this without feeling like it's a real dip in quality after those first three books.
The opening is fantastic, and I really loved everything up to the conclusion of the infiltration of Valiant and Balk. Unfortunately there's where the book loses me. The characters don't feel as well drawn as those in The First Law, with their voices all sort of blurring into one so that I found myself turning back to figure out whose viewpoint we were in fairly frequently. Structurally the book lurches from one set piece to another, without showing us any of the between-times. It's those between-times during the First Law where we really get to know the characters, and while I commend Joe's desire to do something different here it didn't really work for me. Once we get a few murders in everything all starts to feel a little samey, especially once we hit siege warfare and those sections begin to blur into each other. (This is also my complaint about The Last Argument Of Kings, so this is very much a matter of taste rather than explicitly a problem with the book itself).
The most compelling part of this is Shivers' descent, from a man who wants to put the worst parts of his past behind him into the monster he never wanted to become. I wish we'd spent more time in his head, because he's the best thing about the book.