The Trouble With Peace (The Age of Madness #2) by Joe Abercrombie

It’s a real-life lesson in leadership, an allusion to pretentious saviour-Stalins and Christ-Hitlers who believe that they can change the world by breaking it first.

Incredible, stunning conclusion to a fantasy epic by one of the very best in the business.

My respect for Abercrombie has quadrupled in the reading of this book. Such is his ability to weave words with a natural deftness that comes from the same wellspring of creativity as the likes of Brandon Sanderson and Steven Erikson.

He doesn’t write the lengthy epics of the former, but his works are just as good.

The Trouble With Peace is a bloody, GrimDark read of mind-boggling twists and turns. If there’s one word to qualify the happenings in the books, it’s BETRAYAL. There are enough betrayals in here to make Judas Iscariot’s crime against Jesus Christ seem like a marriage proposal.

Anyone reading Joe Abercrombie’s books is advised to not develop too much of an attachment with any of the characters. None of them has any real scruples. Here, you’re likely to have a murderous character make noble-seeming decisions (mentally applauding their new-found insightful redemption, even), only to find out that their stone-cold back-stabbing hearts never froze all along.

In the same vein, seemingly noble characters end up having made stupid, selfish decisions in the name of heroism. It’s a real-life lesson in leadership, an allusion to pretentious saviour-Stalins and Christ-Hitlers who believe that they can change the world by breaking it first. It is true that the worst damage can stem from the best of intentions. But when analyzed deeply from within, it is found that the supposedly good intentions stem from selfishness and arrogant presumption to be the best person to effect such a change.

The Trouble With Peace is an excellent read filled with witty, smooth, suave writing that is, in turn, amusing, thought-provoking, and sobering. Never was a set of characters so grey in mind, body, and soul.

I look forward to seeing how it all ends in The Wisdom of Crowds. Top-quality read, this.