Best Served Cold was published by Gollancz in 2009, the first of three standalone novels set in the First Law world. The novel is structured as a revenge narrative — Monza Murcatto, the most feared mercenary commander in Styria, is thrown from a cliff by Duke Orso, the employer she made powerful, and survives to pursue vengeance against the seven men responsible for her near-death.
The structure allows Abercrombie to examine the revenge genre with the same critical intelligence he brought to heroic fantasy. Each of Monza’s seven kills follows a different sub-genre convention (heist, poisoning, seduction, battlefield), and each reveals something new about the cost of revenge — not moral cost in the abstract, but the specific psychological mechanism by which the avenger’s identity becomes defined by and dependent on the act of vengeance itself.
Monza’s companions include Caul Shivers (a Northman trying to be a better man, whose journey into darkness mirrors her own), Castor Morveer (a poisoner of exquisite self-importance), and Friendly (a convicted murderer with an obsessive counting disorder). Each is drawn to Monza’s quest for reasons that reveal their own pathologies, and each is damaged by participation in ways they did not anticipate.
The novel’s conclusion refuses the catharsis that revenge narratives traditionally provide: Monza achieves her goal but the achievement is hollow, the violence has transformed her into something she would have despised, and the political landscape she has reshaped through murder is no better than what preceded it.
Collecting Best Served Cold
First edition (Gollancz, London, 2009): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Signed first edition: $50–$120
- US first (Orbit, 2009): $15–$35