Joe Abercrombie recently became one of my favourite authors (just after I finished his First Law series last year), so his most recent book, The Devils (the start of a brand-new series), has been at the top of my list for my most anticipated releases this year (also I got an ARC so I got to start reading it a couple of weeks before it’s officially released, yay! (but obligatory this didn’t affect the contents of this review, etc.)).
The book is set in a fantastical medieval Europe with a slightly different history to our own, where the Trojans didn’t lose the Trojan war, Carthage was the dominant ancient Empire over Rome, and God had a daughter instead of a son (there’s more differences, which the history nerd in me loved catching the references to, but these were the most immediately obvious). A branch of the Church, the Chapel of Holy Expediency, employs (aka the 10 year old girl Pope sorcerously compels them) a group of unsavory characters (a reluctant monk, a Viking werewolf, an undead crusader, a very polite vampire, Europe’s third-best necromancer (or second, depending on who you ask), an invisible elf, and a woman with a bunch of knives and an alarming number of previous professions) to escort a long-lost princess across the continent to reclaim her mother’s throne and become Empress of Troy while protecting her from her cousins (and rivals to the crown).
This was probably the funniest Joe Abercrombie book so far (tonally, it’s most similar to Best Served Cold). The characters are fantastic, and there’s lots of quippy one-liners that had me giggling. It’s also probably the least dark of his work—there’s plenty of violence and bad things happening, but it doesn’t quite have the same sort of bleak tone as the previous books. I actually love bleakness, so this wasn’t my favourite of his books, but I still enjoyed it a great deal. My understanding is that this is the first book of a new series, so I’m excited to see where it goes next.