Editors Reads Verdict
The middle book of Abercrombie's First Law trilogy is the engine of the series: larger in scope than the first, darker in execution, and building relentlessly toward a conclusion that will recontextualise everything that came before. It is one of fantasy's finest second acts.
What We Loved
- Three storylines operating at different narrative registers — quest, siege, politics — create a richly layered experience
- Glokta's political storyline is the sharpest writing Abercrombie has produced
- Logen Ninefingers' quest arc deepens his character in ways the first book only gestured toward
- The world-building is expanded without losing the deliberately compressed feel of the setting
Minor Drawbacks
- The middle-book structure means some threads are left conspicuously unresolved
- The quest storyline's companions are less fully developed than the three protagonists
- Readers who prefer forward momentum to character deepening may find some sections slow
Key Takeaways
- → A quest that achieves its object but not its purpose is not a failure of planning — it is a revelation about what the purpose actually was
- → Institutional survival requires participants to become complicit in the institution's worst features
- → The North remembers its dead, but memory is not justice — it is usually just fuel
- → Power structures survive not because the people within them believe in them but because leaving them is more costly than staying
- → Hope is the most dangerous thing you can give someone, because hope has weight and weight can crush
| Author | Joe Abercrombie |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Orbit |
| Pages | 543 |
| Published | March 27, 2007 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fantasy, Grimdark Fantasy, Fiction |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Best For | Readers of The Blade Itself continuing the trilogy; fans of grimdark fantasy and morally complex world-building; readers drawn to fantasy that deconstructs its own genre conventions. |
Three Threads, One Darkening World
Before They Are Hanged opens the First Law trilogy to its full scope. Where The Blade Itself was primarily a character introduction structured around convergence, the second novel sends its protagonists in three different directions and trusts that the reader’s investment in all of them will hold across the divergence.
Bayaz leads a quest west across a dying world, taking Logen Ninefingers, Jezal dan Luthar, and a company of supporting characters in search of an artefact that may or may not be able to save the Union. Collem West commands the northern army against Bethod’s forces in a brutal winter siege. Sand dan Glokta remains in a city increasingly threatened by siege from another direction, trying to hold a political situation together through methods that are, characteristically, not pleasant to describe.
Joe Abercrombie manages the parallel structure with the assurance of a writer who understands exactly what each thread is doing and exactly when to cut between them.
Glokta’s Finest Hour
The political storyline in Before They Are Hanged is, by any measure, the best writing in the trilogy to this point. Glokta’s assignment to hold the city of Dagoska — outnumbered, under-resourced, and served by officials who range from incompetent to actively treasonous — draws out every dimension of his character: the intelligence, the cynicism, the unexpected vein of dark integrity, and the capacity for cruelty that he never confuses with principle.
His running commentary on the operations of power is one of fantasy literature’s great pleasures. He knows exactly how everything works. He knows exactly what it costs. He does it anyway, because the alternative is also terrible, and Glokta has learned to live with terrible.
The Quest That Teaches the Wrong Lesson
Fantasy quests conventionally function as learning arcs: the hero and companions travel, encounter obstacles, and arrive changed and better. Abercrombie is interested in a different question — what happens when the quest achieves its stated object and the achievement means nothing? The western journey in this novel is full of death, sacrifice, and transformation, all of which are subverted at the moment of apparent resolution in ways that reframe what the entire exercise was for.
This is the novel’s most deliberate subversion of the genre, and it lands harder because Abercrombie has taken care to make the journey itself feel meaningful before he reveals what it means.
Setting Up the Fall
Second novels in trilogies are often the most structurally difficult: they cannot simply introduce, and they cannot resolve. Abercrombie solves this problem by building pressure rather than momentum — the world of the First Law is darker at the end of this novel than it was at the beginning, every character is more compromised, and the reader is positioned to understand that the third book’s resolution will not be comforting. It is one of fantasy’s most effective second acts.
Our rating: 4.5/5 — The First Law trilogy’s expansive, darkening middle book: three brilliant storylines, Glokta at his best, and a quest whose ending is its most devastating moment.
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