Brother Diaz arrives at the Chapel of the Holy Expediency expecting a promotion. What he gets is a cell full of monsters: a knight who cannot die because he's already dead in every way that matters, a vampire baron with better manners than morals, a werewolf who treats violence like weather, and a girl who can peel reality open with a word. His job is to keep them pointed at the mission and not at each other. The joke of the book, and it is very much a joke Abercrombie is in on, is that Diaz is the most dangerous person in the room precisely because everyone assumes he's the harmless one.
The premise is Suicide Squad by way of a cracked medieval Europe, but the worldbuilding is what makes it sing rather than just entertain. This isn't the First Law's grubby, mud-and-iron continent; it's a world where the old empire held the elves back with actual magic, that magic is failing, and everyone from popes to princes is scrambling to fill the vacuum with whatever monstrous tool comes to hand. Abercrombie never dumps the history on you. You get it in glances: a ruined watchtower, a saint's bones traded like currency, a princess whose blood is a political weapon before she's said a word. The rules of this world cost something every time a character uses them. Baron Rickard's charm draws blood he has to answer for later. The witch Sunny's power scares her more than it scares her enemies. That's the kind of detail that makes a fantasy setting feel load-bearing instead of decorative.
What carries the book, though, is the company. Abercrombie built his name on morally compromised soldiers and cynical wizards, and here he lets that instinct off the leash entirely, handing the page to a vampire, a werewolf, an elf, a necromancer, and one deeply unlucky monk who is supposed to herd them across a war-torn map to secure a throne. Nobody in this group likes each other, exactly, and the book is smart enough to let that friction generate both the comedy and the stakes. Vigga's blunt hunger for a fight sits right up against Baptiste's oily charisma and Jakob of Thorn's exhausted, centuries-old competence, and watching them fail to get along while somehow getting the job done is most of the fun. Zizka, the group's diplomat and occasional saboteur, gets some of the sharpest lines in the whole book, and Abercrombie earns every laugh by never letting the humor undercut how genuinely lethal these people are.
The plot itself moves in big, blood-soaked set pieces strung along a road trip structure, and it doesn't reinvent that shape so much as attack it at a dead sprint. Battles land with the visceral, unglamorous violence Abercrombie's readers know to expect, but there's a looseness here, a willingness to be openly funny in the middle of the carnage, that feels different from the granite-faced grimness of his earlier work. Political maneuvering around a stolen princess and a contested empire gives the journey a spine, even when individual episodes wander toward pure spectacle. Readers who come in wanting tight, minimal plotting might find a stretch or two where the group's bickering slows the momentum, but the trade-off is a cast so vivid you'd probably follow them through a slower book than this one.
Why you should read
- Fans of morally gray, foul-mouthed fantasy ensembles
- Readers who loved the First Law's cynicism and want more magic
- Anyone who enjoys a Dirty Dozen-style crew on a doomed mission
- Grimdark readers who still want to laugh out loud
What to expect
- Fast, visceral battle sequences with real consequences
- Dark, character-driven humor woven through the violence
- A rotating multi-POV structure across the core crew
- A politically charged quest narrative with a mythic backbone
By the time the mission reaches its bloody, chaotic conclusion, Diaz has stopped being the naive chaplain assigned to mind a pack of horrors and become something closer to their true leader, which is either a triumph or a warning depending on how you read the man underneath the collar. Abercrombie leaves that ambiguity right where it belongs, unresolved and a little unsettling, which is exactly the note a book this gleefully monstrous should end on.
