The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country
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Authors: Joe Abercrombie
Tags: #Fantasy, #Omnibus
BOOK: The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country
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Praise for Joe Abercrombie:
‘Joe Abercrombie’s
Best Served Cold
is a bloody and relentless epic of vengeance and obsession in the grand tradition, a kind of splatterpunk sword ’n sorcery
Count of Monte Cristo
, Dumas by way of Moorcock. His cast features tyrants and torturers, a pair of poisoners, a serial killer, a treacherous drunk, a red-handed warrior and a blood-soaked mercenary captain. And those are the good guys . . . The battles are vivid and visceral, the action brutal, the pace headlong, and Abercrombie piles the betrayals, reversals, and plot twists one atop another to keep us guessing how it will all come out. This is his best book yet’
George RR Martin
‘A satisfyingly brutal fantasy quest. Best served cold? Modern fantasy doesn’t get much hotter than this’
SFX
‘Joe Abercrombie is probably the brightest star among the new generation of British fantasy writers . . . Abercrombie never underestimates the horrors that people are prepared to inflict on one another, or their longlasting, often unexpected, consequences. Abercrombie writes a vivid, well-paced tale that never loosens its grip. His action scenes are cinematic in the best sense, and the characters are all distinct and interesting’
The Times
‘Spiked with cynicism, and indeed spikes,
Best Served Cold
has as much in common with a classic Hollywood caper as it does with the rest of the genre. Moral ambiguity, hard violence, and that weaving of laughter, horror and pathos make it breathe, though the brilliant characters are what really make this soar. This is the highest grade of adult, commercial fantasy we have seen for quite a while’
Deathray
‘Abercrombie is both fiendishly inventive and solidly convincing, especially when sprinkling his appallingly vivid combat scenes with humour so dark that it’s almost ultraviolet’
Publishers’ Weekly
‘Storms along at a breakneck pace. Each character has a history of betrayal and a wobbly moral compass, giving further realism and depth to Abercrombie’s world. The violence is plentiful, the methods of exacting revenge are eye-wateringly inventive and the characters well fleshed out. A fan of Bernard Cornwell’s historical escapades could easily fall for it. Believe the hype’
Waterstone’s Book Quarterly
‘All in all, we can’t say enough good things about Mr Abercrombie’s latest addition to the genre. It’s intelligent, measure, thoughtful, well paced and considered, but retains a sense of fun that has flavoured the rest of his excellent biography. We can’t recommend it enough’
Sci Fi Now
‘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’
Sci-Fi London
‘Abercrombie weaves a dense plot, but not at the expense of the pace, and casts an ensemble of gritty, odd but always interesting characters to undertake Murcatto’s revenge. Fans of Abercrombie’s work will not be disappointed by his latest offering, which features all his usual hallmarks: cold steel, black comedy, fully realised characters and internecine struggles, both personal and epic’
Dreamwatch
‘Abercrombie writes dark, adult fantasy, by which I mean there’s a lot of stabbing in it, and after people stab each other they sometimes have sex with each other. His tone is morbid and funny and hardboiled, not wholly dissimilar to that of Iain Banks . . . Like Fritz Leiber you can see in your head where the blades are going, what is clanging off what, the sweat, the blood, the banter. And like George R. R. Martin Abercrombie has the will and the cruelty to actually kill and maim his characters’
Time Magazine
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