Best Served Cold

By Joe Abecrombie

Best Served Cold by Joe AbercrombieI’ve been waiting for this for a long time, ever since I turned the last page on Joe Abercrombie’s excellent The First Law trilogy in fact, so I have to admit that the joy of opening the post and seeing it there was followed by shameless whooping and hollering as I held it aloft and ran around the house grinning like a maniac. Oh yes, I am a fan.

As you might guess from the title, Best Served Cold is a tale of revenge. Monzcarro Murcatto,The Snake of Talins, Butcher of Caprille is a mercenary. A bloody good one. Her formidable reputation has been forged in the heat of battle leading the Thousand Swords across Styria, her beloved brother at her side, defeating the League of Eight city-by-city and bringing them under the rule of her ruthlessly ambitious employer, Grand Duke Orso, the man who plans to unite all of Styria under his rule.

But Orso sees Murcatto’s popularity in Talins as a threat to his rule and, without warning, he attacks Monza and her brother, killing him outright and throwing her down a mountain to certain death. But Monza doesn’t die. Patched up, barely able to walk let alone hold a sword, she forces herself to regain her strength and then sets about plotting the downfall of the seven men that were in the room when the attack happened, the men who killed her brother, men who must die. Monza knows she cannot hope to do it alone, not in her state, but she has money stashed away, she knows how to fight and how to hire mercenaries, and if there’s one thing she does know, it’s how to lead a team of hired killers.

Vengeance, then.

There are two enormous pleasures in reading Best Served Cold, one is getting to know the new characters, their foibles and their ticks, their hopes and dreams, the other is meeting up with characters you’ve come to know and love from previous books and finding out what they’ve been up to while you were apart. Monza is a heroine with real depth, on the surface she’s dark and ruthless, driven by the need for revenge but dig deeper and we find someone consumed by grief, conflicted in her goals and unsure of what or who she really is now that everything she had has been stripped away. Another newcomer is Castor Morveer, self-proclaimed ‘greatest poisoner in all of Styria’, preening, self-obsessed and treacherous to the core and then there’s my particular favourite, the constantly counting, dice-carrying Friendly, who can only make sense of the world through numbers, because numbers don’t lie, and he needs the order of numbers to control the violent psychopath that lurks very close to the surface.

Amongst the old friends we find Caul Shivers, a Northman, a Named Man and a veteran of many bloody battles, arrived in Styria to change his life and to be a better man. Along the way we pick up the red-haired Shylo Vitari, former Inquisition torturer and doting mother-of-three and finally Nicomo Cosca, womaniser, gambler, infamous mercenary and now notorious drunk and former leader of the Thousand Swords until he was deposed by Monza years before.

Vengeance is a complex motive, at once all-consuming but ultimately utterly unfulfilling. As Monza’s desire for revenge spirals out of control, her personality begins to unravel, making her do and say things she regrets, form alliances with people upon whom she previously waged war and eventually question her own reasons for wanting to see blood. Meanwhile, while each of this wonderful cast has their own motive for going on this journey they are all, in some way, a reflection of some part of Monza and the bonds between them, tenuous to begin with, are eventually broken, forcing each in turn to decide where their loyalties really lie, though in the end, we all only really look after one person.

This is deep, dark stuff but it’s a mark of that nice Mr. Abercrombie’s talent that he can wrap such complex themes in the kind of rip-roaring adventure that is so utterly compelling that, from the first page, it is impossible to put down. The book comprises seven segments, starting in Talins, travelling through other city-states that comprise the League of Eight, despatching a victim in each, and coming full circle back to Talins for the breath-taking and very surprising conclusion. You get a decent flavour of every destination without recourse to overt world-building, the folks you meet on the way have enough depth to carry them through with ease and, as you would expect from this author, the whole is peppered by turns with gut-wrenching violence, nasty, visceral and real and the banter is interspersed with a terrific black humour, the kind that only people for whom dealing out death has become a mundane necessity can really carry off. The pacing throughout is excellent, the language beautifully crafted and, while I guessed the outcome of a couple of the story segments, there’s one hell of good twist right near the end that I defy anybody to have seen coming!

There’s also some mystery; Shenkt, a hired assassin tracking down Monza and her crew provides a welcome, if bloody, respite from the main story and is someone who’s past sounds very interesting. There is politics too, both from the banking house of Valint & Balk who seem to be everywhere, pulling the strings of Kings and Emperors throughout Styria and the Union countries and from the enigmatic Ishri, representative of the Prophet of Gurkhul who opens a doorway to a part of Abercombie’s world that I for one would like to know more about.

Best Served Cold is however a standalone novel, still a refreshing change in a genre awash with trilogies, although it does weigh-in at a healthy 644 pages. This is great news for those of you unfamiliar with the world or the characters because you can dive right in and enjoy this tale for what it is without feeling left behind and for fans the authors previous work it’s a thoroughly absorbing way to get your Abercrombie ‘fix’ without having to wait another year to find out what happened next.

Either way you’d be well advised to place your orders now so you’re not disappointed when it finally hits the streets. Me, I’m actually going to read it again. It’s that good.

Best Served Cold is published by Gollancz and is available from Play.com, Blackwell and all good book stores.

As you might expect, Joe Abercrombie has a blog and you can also watch our interview with him on SCI-FI-LONDON.TV