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A trilogy is a promise, and the third book is where the writer either pays it off or fumbles it. Joe Abercrombie pays it off. Last Argument of Kings is the book where you finally see what the previous two were doing under the dialogue, and the answer is grimmer and smarter than I expected.
Glokta gets the political plot of the year. The siege of Adua is the kind of military set piece that a lesser writer would have made the climax of the whole book. Logen meets his northern fate. Jezal becomes the kind of person he had been pretending to be, which is a horror story in its own quiet way. Bayaz, the wizard who has been steering everyone, is finally seen clearly, and that reveal is one of the most satisfying I have read in fantasy.
What Abercrombie does that almost no one else does in this subgenre is refuse to soften the ending. Characters lose. Characters compromise. The wheel keeps turning. The book closes on a couple of lines that I have thought about repeatedly in the years since I first read them.
Five stars. If you read book one and book two and bounced, this is where the trilogy earns itself. Push through.
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