And the voices he gives them are very distinct. The tone of the writing, the descriptions, dialects, the rhythms and length of the sentences, the hopefulness or crassness, are always tailored to support the mentality of a character in a very natural way. Character is the essence from which the rest of his writing flows.

Rikke, Savine, Orso and Leo are all well-developed foolish young men and women who learn harsh lessons. The new characters have large boots to fill, but for Abercrombie, characterisation is his main strength as a writer and the new ones leap from the page just as much as those in the First Law trilogy. Some of it feels regurgitated, but Abercrombie dives in enthusiastically there’s real craftsmanship on display here and I feel totally safe as a reader that I’m getting a story well-told.

There’s war brewing in the North (again) and desperate journeys through the cold dirt and muck, there’s infighting at court (as always) and young people wanting to make a name for themselves, there’s devious entrepreneurs and poor people scraping by. At times it feels like he is telling the same stories all over again using the same techniques. So, in this sense the book offers more of the same.

Every generation has to learn this anew and the beginnings of industrialisation are simply another sandbox for Abercrombie to play this all out in. That’s where the humanity and dark humor flourishes in his writing. Abercrombie’s best characters are tragic, failed characters who learned wisdom with the years. It gets interesting when those ambitions are thwarted, when the struggles change a person or when success turns out to be a new trap. This series is all about how humans can be pretty brutal to each other when it comes to chasing ambitions. Or read A Little Hatred and then read the previous books for the exploits of all the old people in this one. Actually, I would recommend to read The Heroes (2011) first. You won’t immediately see how Savine has a tongue as sharp as her father Sand and Orso an ineffectual dandy like Jezal used to be. Would this be a good place to start for a reader new to the First Law series? I suppose it is possible, but you’ll have to work a little to get all the factions straight and the references to legendary characters like the Bloody-Nine, the Dogman and Inquisitor Glokta will go over your head. He also throws a whole bucket of new characters in our faces and it feels a bit much at first, but when you discover that these are the offspring of the First Law characters then you can see the old ones reflected in their personalities. It wasn’t like that in the previous books, but I appreciate that Abercrombie is reinventing the setting. Set in the First Law world, A Little Hatred takes us a few decades into the future, to a world of late Middle Ages and the rising chimneys of industrialisation. A start of a new series! Exciting! But not totally new.

First law a little hatred