This was a slog. Three stars is a gift. I am invested in the characters based on the previous two novels, which were excellent. In the beginning I enjoyed the militaristic strategy the protagonists, Kilroy, took to surviving the zombie apocalypse; it's what kept him and the people he found along the way alive for as long as they have been. It was enough to make sense why he survived and was able to help people along the way; creating a community of survivors.

This novel took away the connection with the characters, changed the plot, made it slightly convoluted and ramped up the military aspect to 1,000. This novel is 80 percent military jargon and operations now, as Kil and his group encounter a working branch of military and he, as an enlisted man, is pushed back into service.

While I am still very invested in the characters and would like to see where this goes, but who knows what gresh hell the next installment will bring.

It's not terrible, but all the excess military talk/speak/jargon is what is making this less likeable that the first two novels in the series. I'm invested in the characters and sometime there a chapters that are just further the story. Other times it so confusing it makes my head spin. 

Joe Abercrombie's talent is to make an experience so real that you feel you're there.

He turns an incident when a boat, being portered over a mountain, slips its ropes and must be held fast by an exceptionally strong man a great personal cost, into something filled with tension and pain and sweat and stoic selfless bravery that bypasses analysis and hits your emotions like an injection of adrenalin to the heart

Interesting... so crankypants' issue with magic wielders stems from the late queen's parents' treatment of him.

The adventure in this incident involves a discovery of bones, an old betrayal, and... I can't help but wonder though if perhaps things still managed to be misread. It was centuries in the past though,

Amusing part - h asking her cousin to put in a word for the H so he could be assigned a position closer so she could have sex with him. Rather blunt there. But then, this story was unusually blunt. I suppose it's fitting that this H uttered a curse or two.