Red Country

I am an Abercrombie fangirl, really, I am. Once again, we return to this gritty, grimy brutal world, full of terrible people. It's really not a fantasy novel at all this time, it's 100% western, which is really not my style, but it was excellent.

Our main protagonist is Shy South, a farmer in the Near Country, a frontier region west of the Union. She lives on a farm with her two younger siblings and an old guy from the North called Lamb who is a father figure to her. One day the two of them come home from trading in town to find their farm has been burned down, and the children have been kidnapped. This begins a long ordeal of the two of them chasing the bandits who are stealing children, taking them ever more west to the Far Country, the gold rush frontier.

Anyone who has read the First Law trilogy will not really have any issues identifying who Lamb really is. There are more familiar characters from the series. The mercenary Nicomo Cosca and his helper Friendly re-appear, the Mayor in the really disgustingly described frontier town Crease is also a familiar female character, there's Caul Shivers, etc.

But you don't really need to know the characters or the world to get this story. It's full of blood, murder, tragedies, characters dying, and even the sort of happy end leaves your mouth tasting like ash. Abercrombie's character work and his witty writing remain the star of his books.

My favorite character was probably Temple, Cosca's lawyer who turns out to be craven, and useless at most things in life, but useful when it's needed. His romance with Shy (if you can call it that) is one of the few things that warmed my heart here.