Revenge is a dish...

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Joe Abercrombie... the dedication at the start of this novel says it all:

For Grace

One day you will read this

And be slightly worried

In his First Law Trilogy there was at most two decent people, everyone else was treacherous, deceitful, sadistic, egomaniacal and/or tragically deluded. As a friend of mine commented,"The most likable person in it was a torturer."

As the title would indicate, this is a story about ice-cream.

It is very similar in format to Kill Bill, although bloodier, with more psychopaths, far more collateral damage, a blacker morality and a less predictable series of events.

As usual for Mr Abercrombie, it is a fantasy without a hero in sight. It features likable side characters from his first books, who are fortunate enough to be fleshed out into generally even more despicable individuals, and some new lovable sociopaths.

It has copious amounts of dark humour and bad-ass fight scenes.

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A Shakespearian or Greek tragedy has a protagonist in it that is a great person albeit it with a single and most likely fatal flaw. I think we need a technical term for the type of stuff this man puts out since it tends to be the complete opposite. I vote for anti-tragedy.