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Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
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Best Served Cold (edition 2012)

by Joe Abercrombie

Series: First Law World (1)

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2,848924,945 (4.01)100
Fantasy. Fiction. Historical Fiction. HTML:Springtime in Styria. And that means war.
There have been nineteen years of blood. The ruthless Grand Duke Orso is locked in a vicious struggle with the squabbling League of Eight, and between them they have bled the land white. While armies march, heads roll and cities burn, and behind the scenes bankers, priests and older, darker powers play a deadly game to choose who will be king.
War may be hell but for Monza Murcatto, the Snake of Talins, the most feared and famous mercenary in Duke Orso's employ, it's a damn good way of making money too. Her victories have made her popular ?? a shade too popular for her employer's taste. Betrayed, thrown down a mountain and left for dead, Murcatto's reward is a broken body and a burning hunger for vengeance. Whatever the cost, seven men must die.
Her allies include Styria's least reliable drunkard, Styria's most treacherous poisoner, a mass-murderer obsessed with numbers and a Northman who just wants to do the right thing. Her enemies number the better half of the nation. And that's all before the most dangerous man in the world is dispatched to hunt her down and finish the job Duke Orso started.
… (more)
Member:hardysponge
Title:Best Served Cold
Authors:Joe Abercrombie
Info:Orbit (2012), Edition: Reprint, Paperback, 656 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:****
Tags:None

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Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

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Showing 1-5 of 87 (next | show all)
Unrelieved grimness in the form of unsympathetic characters performing reprehensible acts for no purpose other than revenge or being hired to help with revenge. ( )
  Treebeard_404 | Jan 23, 2024 |
I failed to care about the motivations of any character. Perhaps that was the point, but it doesn't result in a good read ( )
  sarcher | Dec 28, 2023 |
This extremely cynical book (alongside the previous books in this world) is the closest thing I read to anti-militaristic "epic" fantasy. ( )
  eyal6699 | Dec 8, 2023 |
THis was a dark book but I loved it none the less. I know Martin is the standard bearer for the new epic fantasy boom but Abercrombie is a magician. I will read everything he writes. ( )
  cdaley | Nov 2, 2023 |
I am really sad that this book fell by the wayside for me.
I very much enjoyed the truly dark and gritty setting.
Viewing a story from the perspective of arguably the bad guys was refreshing and well done. I think what the author was going for was truly ambiguous grey but it ended up more like almost black.
I don't think I have seen grey characters as well done as Abercrombie manages to anywhere else but for me, the story ended up trying too hard and eventually seemed to forget what it even wanted to accomplish.
Let's start with a rather petty criticism. Human bodies in this story are made of gelly. A three-year-old can accidentally behead someone with a butter knife in this world. It starts out fairly believable mainly because the MC had to survive so human sturdiness mostly prevailed but later on people lose their limbs just by being looked at wrong. And I am not talking about magic. It made it really hard for me to take even desperate and bloody massacres seriously.

Another problem with basically all action scenes was that the deciding factor always ended up being stupid luck. Like extreme, slip on a banana peel and impale yourself on a broom handle levels of stupid. I never at any point had the feeling any of these characters won a fight on their own merit at all. We are constantly told about how great the cast is but all we actually see is then stumbling around.
Maybe this was supposed to be a manifestation of Helmuth von Moltke's famous quote "No strategy survives first contact with the enemy." and was supposed to show how chaotic and random bloody battles like that can be but even if that was the intention it just came across as ridiculous.

Later on, the characters (and with them the story) start to devolve into caricatures of themselves.
I am not sure if this was intended to bring the true descent into insanity of some of these characters closer to the reader or something but if that was the intention it failed utterly for me. These supposedly extraordinary people started to act more and more stupid and decisions seemed less and less reasonable. TSTL came to mind repeatedly.

Especially around the poisoner, it seemed like even the author forgot what kind of personality he was supposed to have. I think of the whole cast, the poisoner is his worst character by far.

Furthermore, we have curious cases of amnesia. They employ various tools and tactics to solve problems but they never consider them again even if they would easily solve a problem later on as well. Instead, they have to come up with some absurdly contrived and overly complicated new plan.
What's obviously happening here is that the tools they have at their disposal are too powerful and to make things challenging the author needed to entirely abandon common sense sometimes.

I liked the unpredictability in general because it was clear that no one except the MC had plot armour of any kind. The author overdid it to a large degree for my taste though. Many deaths were really stupid and unnecessary and felt like the author screaming at me "SEE? MY CHARACTERS CAN ALL DIE! SEE? I JUST KILLED HIM! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? I CAN KILL ANYONE AT ANY TIME!". Oh my god, I get it. Because of this constant in-your-face stuff I just desensitised to it all eventually and stopped caring about anyone. And what happens if the reader stops caring? He loses interest. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. But I guess a big part of the problem was the stupid ways people died. At some point, it almost started to feel like a final destination movie.

There seemed to be some kind of message in it all. With all the waxing poetic about the purpose of revenge and stuff but never getting to any kind of point. That was my feeling in general with this book in regards to many aspects. It just painfully refused to get to the point.

Something that is a pet peeve of mine is present in this book also. That being family excuses everything. This idea that family somehow is allowed to do to each other whatever they want and you forgive it all because "family" never sat right with me.
I know there are many families that teach this kind of thinking but I could never really see the difference between that and the typical brainwashing indoctrination methods of cults. At the end of the day, it's just an excuse to have someone you can abuse just like some cults do.
I am not saying deep family bonds like that can't exist but if they are true they develop naturally and I can for the life of me not see any such bond developing between the MC and her brother. But I guess all these characters are so incredibly deeply flawed that this actually is a rather minor point in the grand scheme of things.

I am at a point now at which I just don't care anymore what happens next. I am just tired of it all.
I dropped at around 70% I guess? Maybe a bit more. I didn't check when I gave up.

This all sounds scathing and I really stopped enjoying it at some point but many of my complaints are on a high level. Compared to the average shallow fantasy you find at every corner this is still a very well written book with a very unique feel to it. But as a more complex book, it also ended up having more complex issues. ( )
  omission | Oct 19, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 87 (next | show all)
This inevitably makes Best Served Cold something of a novel of parts—some very good, exhilarating or terrifying or amusing, but no more a coherent whole for that. The frenetic plot does, however, feed into a broader aesthetic of denial, even if it could have been more elegantly done
 
Joe Abercrombie takes the grand tradition of high fantasy literature and drags it down into the gutter, in the best possible way.
added by Shortride | editTime (Aug 7, 2009)
 

» Add other authors (11 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Joe Abercrombieprimary authorall editionscalculated
Borchardt, KirstenTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Graffet, DidierCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Senior, DaveMapsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
To have a good enemy, choose a friend: he knows where to strike. - Diane de Poitiers
Men become accustomed to poison by degrees. - Victor Hugo
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. - Joseph Conrad
War without fire is as worthless as sausages without mustard - Henry V.
For mercenaries are disunited, thirsty for power, undisciplined, and disloyal; they are brave among their friends and cowards before the enemy; they have no fear of God, they do not keep faith with their fellow men; they avoid defeat just as long as they avoid battle; in peacetime you are despoiled by them and in wartime by the enemy. - Niccoló Machiavelli
Dedication
For Grace
One day you will read this
And be slightly worried
First words
The sunrise was the colour of bad blood.
Quotations
"Veränderungen, Freundlich ... es ist so eine Sache damit. Manchmal ändert sich ein Mensch zum Besseren. Manchmal ändert sich ein Mensch zum Schlechteren. Und oft, sehr oft, sobald er die Zeit und die Möglichkeit bekommt ..." Er wedelte kurz mit seinem Flachmann, dann zuckte er die Achseln. "Dann macht er alle Änderungen wieder rückgängig."
Aber er war ein besserer Mensch, da war er sich sich sicher. Weiser. Früher war er sich selbst sein größter Feind gewesen. Jetzt war er der größte Feind aller anderen.
Je mehr man einem Mann gibt, desto mehr verlangt er und desto weniger glücklich ist er auch. Niemand weiß je etwas zu schätzen, das er umsonst bekommen hat. Die Pest über die verdammte Mildtätigkeit.
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Fantasy. Fiction. Historical Fiction. HTML:Springtime in Styria. And that means war.
There have been nineteen years of blood. The ruthless Grand Duke Orso is locked in a vicious struggle with the squabbling League of Eight, and between them they have bled the land white. While armies march, heads roll and cities burn, and behind the scenes bankers, priests and older, darker powers play a deadly game to choose who will be king.
War may be hell but for Monza Murcatto, the Snake of Talins, the most feared and famous mercenary in Duke Orso's employ, it's a damn good way of making money too. Her victories have made her popular ?? a shade too popular for her employer's taste. Betrayed, thrown down a mountain and left for dead, Murcatto's reward is a broken body and a burning hunger for vengeance. Whatever the cost, seven men must die.
Her allies include Styria's least reliable drunkard, Styria's most treacherous poisoner, a mass-murderer obsessed with numbers and a Northman who just wants to do the right thing. Her enemies number the better half of the nation. And that's all before the most dangerous man in the world is dispatched to hunt her down and finish the job Duke Orso started.

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Orbit Books

3 editions of this book were published by Orbit Books.

Editions: 0316044962, 0316044954, 0316198358

Hachette Book Group

2 editions of this book were published by Hachette Book Group.

Editions: 0316044962, 0316044954

Tantor Media

An edition of this book was published by Tantor Media.

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