Best Served Cold »

Joe Abercrombie is a freelance film editor, working mostly on documentaries and live music events for bands from Coldplay to Iron Maiden. He lives and works in London. He was nominated for the 2008 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Visit Joe Abercrombie online at www.joeabercrombie.com.

Dark fantasy meets hard-boiled thriller in a stand-alone tale of revenge, set in the world of acclaimed author Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy.

Publishers Weekly

Abercrombie returns to the blood-drenched arena of the First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, etc.) with this skillfully crafted and bleakly humorous sword and sorcery adventure. Duke Orso imagines that he can become king by ending the civil wars that have devastated Styria, but he errs by trying to kill his overly popular general, mercenary Monza Murcatto. Recovering from her massive injuries and mourning her murdered brother, Monza vows vengeance on Orso and half a dozen of his accomplices. Employing her own motley crew of death dealers, Monza gets her revenge, but it's neither simple nor satisfying; each target requires fresh strategy, and each death has unexpected effects. Abercrombie is both fiendishly inventive and solidly convincing, especially when sprinkling his appallingly vivid combat scenes with humor so dark that it's almost ultraviolet. (Aug.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.