Joel Abercrombies' Last Argument of Kings series

[The Nomad]

I've seen this trilogy on Amazon and wondered if anyone here had read it, and if so, what is their opinion of it?

[The Grim Squeaker]

I picked it up while I was in the USA (Amazon kept recomending it to me).

I really enjoyed it, it's well written, interesting, amusing and has some great characters. I'd definetly recomend it, I picked up the first, then 2&3 simultaneously and didn't regret it a bit.

Also, the ending's a lovely bit of a rollercoasting bitch .

[Thanas]

Do they feature cannons? Because otherwise the title makes no sense.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Do they feature cannons? Because otherwise the title makes no sense.

They do, but not as a main feature (book 3 has some gunpowder equilevents)

[Guardsman Bass]

They're pretty good, character-centric books. In particular, Abercrombie is good at creating characters whose heads you can get into and like, but when you step back, you realize that they actually aren't very nice people, such
Spoiler

Bayaz, who turned out to be a ruthless, egomaniacal powermonger who gladly condemned tens of thousands of Gurkish captives to starvation and thousands of folks in the city to radiation poisoning for the sake of his new magic art. Or Logun, who has gotten better, but is still pretty nasty in some ways (and some of his viewpoints seem unreliable and self-serving).

Then there's Glokta, who you can get into and sympathize with - until you remember that he's a professional torturer who actually enjoys his work to some extant, and who concludes the series in getting the lesbian queen to have sex with her husband by threatening her lover with gang rape. Hell, even Jezal's nasty in his own ways - he's a coward who has been manipulated for much of his life in order to serve as a figurehead ruler.

They're all still very interesting characters, but they certainly can be nasty.

[Darth Tanner]

Also his new book Best Served Cold is out now. It basically moves the plot onto some of the minor characters from the original trilogy and into Styria which is loosely mentioned in the books.

I'm only halfway through but it's a great read so far!

I fully recommend you buy the original trilogy immediately, their some of the best fiction I've read in ages.

can be nasty

Understatement of the year!