silverflight8 | Best Served Cold: Joe Abercrombie

I should have guessed from the title, but I had no idea how gory this book would be.

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, behind the scenes bankers and 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 Grand 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 employers' 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 Barbarian 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...

Springtime in Styria. And that means revenge.

Like lj-cut says - Monza was a mercenary commander for the Grand Duke Orso. I interpreted Styria as a whole bunch of city-states, some bound in temporary alliances with each other. Afraid that Monza and her brother were too popular and successful, and would overthrow him, Orso kills Benna, Monza's brother, and attempts to do the same to Monza. When she wakes up again, she vows vengeance and decides to slay all of the men who tried to kill her.

I found the strength of the novel was in the supporting characters. Cosca, the mercenary (and drunkard alluded to on the cover) was inappropriately cheerful all the time and funny, and gave the book some much needed levity; the ironically-named convict named Friendly was interesting, and Morveer, the poisoner, sort of bizarre. Abercrombie did a good job of making each voice distinct. It made me sad how Shivers' storyline turned out, but I think trying to blunt the ending would have made it worse - as though the author weren't willing to really cut ties with the character.

As I said, I underestimated the goriness. On the back flap they mention "an unpretentious read" and etcetera, but I thought after awhile it was just extra, gratuitous violence. It was graphic and each battle went on for pages. The other thing that was irritating was the dialect used in narration, and I am sure that adding a few ands here and there wouldn't hurt at all - Abercrombie tends to use long phrases with many many commas and doesn't cap them off with anything:

There surely was a seedy look about the place, though, as the sailors scuttled to make the boat fast to the dock. Brick buildings lined the grey sweep of the bay, narrow windowed, all squashed in together, roofs slumping, paint peeling, cracked-up render stained with salt, green with moss, black with moulds. Down near the slimy cobbles the walls were plastered over with big papers, slapped up at all angles, ripped and pasted over each other, torn edges fluttering.

And Monza. Poor Monza. Abercrombie seems to start with some kind of theme (Shivers is someone willing to change from his war-mongering ways, etc) about redemption, abandons it midway through, and ends on a note that I have questions about. I think I liked thinking of Monza as completely brutal, as she is presented initially; having all those flashbacks trying to mitigate her role (she's called, variously, the Butcher, Snake, etc) wasn't worth it, I think. I wish Abercrombie had just stuck to it and kept her as a pitiless mercenary.

The rating was hard to pin down for this one, because while I did enjoy much of it, I found the extraneous violence grating. 7.5/10