Book review: The Devils

By Joe "Heroes" Abercrombie. It is... OK, I guess. But desperately formulaic. Pack of unlikely assorted magical adventurers sets out across the world on <task> and has <fights> along the way. 

In Heroes and BSC, and perhaps also in TBI, there was at least a spark of something more original; I would have hoped he might make some attempt to escape the tropes of his genre; but no, everything falls back into the same old lazy patterns. Am I too old? Have I read too much? Should I just put in a bit more effort and read better books? I fear that is the case.

To give some positives: the <cast of characters> are fun, there are some jokes, and the world might even be interesting. And of course I did actually finish the thing.

And yet... JA surely made lots of money from his previous books. Could he not afford to have spent an extra year and a bit more care producing this one? For myself, I spent about ten minutes writing this review, and don't feel that I owe it any more time.