"Best Served Cold"

Joe Abercrombie is the author of The First Law trilogy: The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings. In 2008 he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell award for best new writer.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to Best Served Cold, a standalone book set in the same world as The First Law trilogy, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Best Served Cold (in the US hardcover, anyway) features a very unpleasant revenge killing, in which a man is garrotted then has his head bashed in with a hammer. Ouch. Since Best Served Cold is the tale of a ruthless woman seeking revenge on the seven men who left her brother dead and her nearly dead, it is not entirely unrepresentative of the content. It’s quite a violent book.

Funnily enough, page 69 of the UK hardcover features a woman engaged in a battle of wits with a treacherous master poisoner while they trade amusing small talk. Since Best Served Cold is the tale of a rogue’s gallery of bizarre characters including a psychopath obsessed by numbers, the world’s least reliable drunkard, a poisoner’s apprentice who can’t stop eating, a hard-bitten female torturer, and a duke with a urine fetish, this is also not entirely unrepresentative of the content. It’s quite an amusing book.

Read an excerpt from Best Served Cold, and learn more about the author and his work at Joe Abercrombie's website and blog.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue