Logen Ninefingers, infamous barbarian, has finally run out of luck. Caught in one feud too many, he's on the verge of becoming a dead barbarian -- leaving nothing behind him but bad songs, dead friends, and a lot of happy enemies.
Nobleman, dashing officer, and paragon of selfishness, Captain Jezal dan Luthar has nothing more dangerous in mind than fleecing his friends at cards and dreaming of glory in the fencing circle. But war is brewing, and on the battlefields of the frozen North they fight by altogether bloodier rules.
Inquisitor Glokta, cripple turned torturer, would like nothing better than to see Jezal come home in a box. But then Glokta hates everyone: cutting treason out of the Union one confession at a time leaves little room for friendship. His latest trail of corpses may lead him right to the rotten heart of government, if he can stay alive long enough to follow it.
Enter the wizard, Bayaz. A bald old man with a terrible temper and a pathetic assistant, he could be the First of the Magi, he could be a spectacular fraud, but whatever he is, he's about to make the lives of Logen, Jezal, and Glokta a whole lot more difficult.
Murderous conspiracies rise to the surface, old scores are ready to be settled, and the line between hero and villain is sharp enough to draw blood.
Abercrombie takes the wizard, the quest and the grizzled warrior, then shows you what they look like with the nobility scraped off. The three leads would be villains in a standard fantasy: a savage, a coward and a torturer. It works because the book is funny. The author says the jokes exist to sharpen the dark moments, and they do.
Glokta is the reason to start. Reviewers treat him as the book's best creation, and his chapters are the sharpest in it. Think of the whole thing as a long fuse: the viewpoints take their time converging, and the real reward waits in the later books. Patient readers get a rich burn. Anyone wanting a bang in chapter ten should look elsewhere.
The book is a genuine fault line. Strange Horizons admired how it rebuilds epic fantasy while mocking it, while Publishers Weekly bounced off the violence, the repetitive prose and a cast it found mostly unlikable. Reactor called it a grim, ultraviolent riff on Martin-style fantasy and the opening move of a longer game.
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Joseph Edward Abercrombie is a British author of epic fantasy books and a film editor. He is the author of The First Law and The Age of Madness trilogies, as well as other fantasy books in the same setting, and a trilogy of young adult novels. His novel Half a King won the 2015 Locus Award for best young adult book.
The First Law
