Best Served Cold

I read Best Served Cold after finishing the First Law trilogy, expecting a side story. What I got was a revenge novel that keeps asking whether revenge is worth the person it turns you into. It has the same dry, nasty humor as the trilogy, the same affection for damaged people, and the same interest in what violence does to a body after the fighting stops. It is also longer than it needs to be. Both things are true.

The fall

Monzcarro Murcatto, called Monza, is the captain general of the Thousand Swords, a mercenary company that has spent years winning battles for Grand Duke Orso of Talins. She is famous, and the people cheer her in the streets. That is the problem. Orso has decided that a popular general is a future rival, so he invites Monza and her brother Benna to the fortress of Fontezarmo and has them killed.

It does not go cleanly. Orso's bodyguard Gobba garrotes Monza. Orso's son, Prince Ario, stabs Benna. General Ganmark runs Benna through. Faithful Carpi, a man Monza trusted, attacks her with her own dagger. Gobba crushes her right hand, and the men throw her from the fortress wall. She survives because Benna's body is caught on a tree below and breaks her fall. It is the first of the novel's many jokes about luck, and it is not funny.

A healer finds her and spends weeks putting her back together. Her skull is repaired with gold coins. Her right hand is a twisted claw. She is addicted to husk, a narcotic that controls the pain. When she can walk again, she goes to her father's abandoned farm, digs up a cache of gold and weapons, and decides that seven men have to die. The list includes Gobba, the banker Mauthis, Prince Ario, General Ganmark, Faithful Carpi, Prince Foscar, and Orso himself.

The crew

Monza cannot do this alone. She recruits a crew that is less a team than a collection of people with incompatible damage.

Friendly is a huge ex-convict who thinks in numbers. He counts everything, including the people he kills, and he finds comfort in arithmetic because numbers do not lie. Caul Shivers is a Northman who came to Styria hoping to leave violence behind. He wants to be a better man, and he is not sure what that means. Nicomo Cosca is Monza's old mentor, a legendary general who is now a drunk and a liability. Castor Morveer is a poisoner with a high opinion of himself and a habit of talking too much. Day is his apprentice, quiet and watchful. Shylo Vitari is a former torturer who sells information and knows how to find people.

They are not a family. They are a business arrangement held together by money, fear, and the fact that Monza is the only one with a plan. Abercrombie gives each of them a distinct voice, which is one of the book's pleasures. Friendly's counting, Morveer's vanity, Cosca's theatrical self-pity, and Shivers's slow disappointment all sound different on the page.

The list

The structure is simple: one target at a time, one city at a time. Gobba is first. Monza and her crew ambush him in the street, and she kills him with a hammer. It is a deliberate echo of what Gobba did to her hand. The scene is brutal and intimate, and it sets the tone for the rest of the book.

Mauthis is a banker for Valint and Balk, and he witnessed the attack at Fontezarmo. Morveer poisons the ledgers in the bank's office. Mauthis dies when he touches the pages, and so do several clerks. Monza is furious about the collateral damage. Morveer thinks she is being sentimental. Shivers threatens to leave, and Monza has to pay him more to stay. The argument is not about morality in the abstract. It is about whether Monza is allowed to pretend that her revenge is clean.

The next target is Prince Ario, who is celebrating at Cardotti's House of Leisure in Sipani. The plan is complicated by the arrival of King Jezal dan Luthar of the Union, who happens to be there with his guards. Monza drugs Jezal with husk and kills Ario, but the operation turns into a fire, a panic, and a running battle. Carlot dan Eider, Ario's mistress and a Union spy, survives and sends word to Orso that Monza is still alive. The set piece is one of the best in the book: funny, chaotic, and mean.

Visserine and the cost

Orso's army moves on Visserine under Ganmark. Monza's crew is betrayed by a farmer they had helped, and Monza and Shivers are captured. They are tortured. An interrogator burns out Shivers's left eye with a hot iron. Shivers came to Styria hoping to become less violent, and the torture takes that hope away from him in a few minutes. The novel is careful about this. It does not say that violence is inevitable. It says that a man can be broken in ways that make his old intentions irrelevant.

Cosca talks his way into the confidence of Grand Duke Salier, and the crew arranges a trap in Salier's art gallery. Monza fights Ganmark in a long, ugly duel. Cosca is stabbed through the stomach and appears to die. A marble statue topples and impales Ganmark on its bronze sword. It is a ridiculous way to kill a man, and Abercrombie knows it. The absurdity is part of the point. Revenge does not produce clean, meaningful deaths. It produces accidents, mess, and jokes that nobody is in the mood to laugh at.

Orso hires Shenkt, an assassin with unnatural speed and strength, to hunt Monza. Shenkt is one of the book's most memorable figures. He is calm, almost gentle, and completely unstoppable. He follows Monza's trail and kills everyone at Sajaam's smoke-house before continuing the pursuit.

The politics get in the way

Monza's revenge becomes entangled with the wider war. She allies with Grand Duke Rogont of Ospria and Ishri, an agent of the Gurkish Empire. Faithful Carpi is lured into an ambush, and Monza chases him to a millstream where his cloak catches in a waterwheel and he drowns. It is not the death she wanted. It is the death she gets.

Morveer discovers that Day has tried to poison him, so he tricks her into drinking a fatal dose. Day dies. Morveer leaves the crew and offers his services to Orso. This subplot is one of the book's weaker threads. Day is given just enough personality to make her death sad, but not enough to make the betrayal feel earned. It reads like a complication added to keep the middle moving.

Cosca reappears, having survived his wound, and takes command of the Thousand Swords under Prince Foscar. He has secretly stopped drinking, which makes him more competent and no more trustworthy. Rogont's plan is to draw Orso's army into battle at Ospria while a Sipanese force attacks from behind. Cosca accepts Gurkish gold and keeps the Thousand Swords out of the fight. The Sipanese strike Foscar's forces, and Monza leads a cavalry charge that saves Rogont's flank. Foscar is captured. Monza hesitates to kill him, and Shivers smashes his skull.

That moment matters. Shivers tells Monza that she is not as evil as she pretends to be, and it is not a compliment. It is an accusation. He has become the violence she needed, and he has lost something in the process. Monza has spent the whole book telling herself that she is doing what has to be done. Shivers is the evidence that someone always pays for that story.

The coronation

Rogont rewards Monza by making her Grand Duchess of Talins, and he plans to be crowned King of Styria. At the coronation, Morveer, now working for Orso, has poisoned the crown. Rogont and several other leaders die when they touch it. Monza survives because the glove on her ruined right hand keeps the poison off her skin. The injury that was meant to humiliate her saves her life. It is the kind of irony Abercrombie loves, and he does not underline it.

The alliance collapses. Monza turns to Cosca and the Thousand Swords and besieges Fontezarmo. Cosca kills captains who turn against him. Morveer sneaks into Cosca's quarters and pricks himself with his own poisoned needle. It is a fitting death for a man who thought he was the smartest person in the room. Eider manipulates Shivers into believing that Monza is going to discard him, and Shivers attacks Monza inside the palace. Friendly intervenes, and the fight becomes a brutal, exhausting brawl. Shenkt arrives and throws Shivers aside.

Shenkt is then revealed to be the healer who saved Monza after her fall. He has been involved in her revenge from the beginning, and his motives are not fully explained. In Orso's study, Monza learns that Benna had been secretly plotting to overthrow Orso and make her Grand Duchess. She did not know about the plot, but Orso's fear of her was not entirely imaginary. Shenkt destroys Orso's guards, and Monza runs Orso through with Benna's sword.

What remains

Orso is dead. Monza releases Shivers and gives him back the ruby ring. He heads north, a harder and more dangerous man than the one who arrived. Monza stays in Talins to rule. She is pregnant, and the father may be Rogont or Shivers. Orso's crown sits in her desk. She has won, and the win looks like a job.

The novel's title comes from the proverb that revenge is a dish best served cold. Abercrombie spends the whole book testing that idea. Monza's revenge is cold, calculated, and successful, and it still leaves her with a ruined hand, a dead brother, a drug habit, and a throne she did not really want. The book is not against revenge as a story engine. It is against the fantasy that revenge will make you whole.

Monza is also a harder character to like than the book seems to think. She is competent, funny, and relentless, but she keeps her interior life at a distance. We understand her grief for Benna, and we understand her rage, but we do not spend much time inside her beyond those two feelings. Some of that is deliberate. She has trained herself to be a general, and a general cannot afford to be soft. Some of it is a limitation. The novel gives Shivers a richer arc than it gives its protagonist, and by the end I was more interested in what had happened to him than in what Monza would do with her crown.

The political ending is also more interesting than the emotional one. Monza becomes a ruler, which means she inherits the same problems that made Orso want to kill her. The book does not pretend that she has escaped the cycle. It just puts her on the other side of the desk. That is a smart ending, and a less satisfying one than a clean act of vengeance would have been.

Where it sags and where it sings

The biggest problem is length. The middle section, with its repeated pattern of arrival, planning, betrayal, and kill, starts to feel like a schedule. Some targets are more interesting than others, and the novel does not always justify the time it spends on the less interesting ones. The Day and Morveer subplot is the clearest example. It is not bad, but it does not add enough to the main story to earn its space.

The best parts are the character scenes. Monza and Shivers on the road, Cosca lying to everyone including himself, Friendly counting his way through a massacre, Morveer explaining his own genius to a room that has stopped listening. Abercrombie writes violence with a clear eye and a dirty sense of humor, and he writes the aftermath even better. The bruises, the missing eye, the tremoring hand, the way a person changes after doing something unforgivable: that is where the book is strongest.

I would recommend it to readers who liked the First Law trilogy and want more of that world, and to anyone who likes revenge stories that are honest about the cost. It can be read on its own. You do not need to know the trilogy to follow it, though you will get more from the cameos if you do. It is not a cheerful book. It is a book about people who have confused survival with winning, and it is very good at showing why that confusion is dangerous.