The Trouble with Peace — The Age of Madness, Book 2

The Trouble with Peace Review

The second volume of the Age of Madness trilogy is where Abercrombie’s structural ambitions become fully visible. A Little Hatred established the conditions for catastrophe; The Trouble with Peace watches those conditions produce consequences that every character tries and fails to control. It is a book about the limits of intelligent management in the face of structural forces, and its politics are Abercrombie’s most sophisticated.

The Union’s peace is the problem — not the peace itself, but the fact that it has produced a class of men whose entire identity is constituted by war, and who find the dispossession of industrial capitalism intolerable. Savine dan Glokta, now leveraging her position for maximum advantage, continues to fascinate as a portrait of someone who understands exploitation precisely because she is both its agent and its product. Leo dan Brock, whose desire to be heroic overrides his capacity to think, begins the trajectory that will define his arc across the trilogy.

Abercrombie’s gift for political mechanics — how populist movements are manipulated by those who think they can control them, how the people with the best information make the worst decisions because they cannot see their own blind spots — is on full display. The tragedy is structural: the characters are not stupid, and they are not simply villains. They are people whose individual rationality produces collective catastrophe, which is a more frightening story than any simpler account of villainy would be.

The middle-volume problem that hobbles so many trilogies barely applies here. The Trouble with Peace ends in a position of genuine devastation that makes The Wisdom of Crowds feel necessary rather than obligatory.

Reading Order

Read A Little Hatred first. The Age of Madness trilogy should be read in sequence. Familiarity with the original First Law trilogy enriches the experience considerably.

Reading Guides

• Joe Abercrombie Books in Order: First Law and Complete Reading Guide (2026)

How Populist Movements Are Made and Used

The Trouble with Peace is Abercrombie’s most explicitly political novel, and its politics are those of a writer who has been paying close attention to how democratic institutions fail. The novel was published in September 2020 — mid-pandemic, mid-crisis for many of the democratic institutions it implicitly examines — and its portrait of how popular anger is manufactured, directed, and ultimately exploited by those who understand it better than the people experiencing it reads with uncomfortable contemporaneity.

The Great Change — the workers’ movement building through A Little Hatred — is real in the sense that its grievances are real. The displacement caused by industrialisation, the impoverishment of artisan workers, the failure of the Union’s political class to address mounting inequality: these are not manufactured by the movement’s leaders. What is manufactured is the specific direction of that anger, the specific targets it is given, the specific moment chosen for escalation. Abercrombie is precise about who does the manufacturing and why, and the answer is not a simple story about cynical manipulation of sincere believers. The manipulators partly believe their own manipulation; the believers have reasons to believe; the outcome is catastrophic regardless.

Leo dan Brock’s Trajectory

Leo dan Brock is one of Abercrombie’s most studied exercises in the psychology of a certain kind of male ambition: the man who wants to be a hero, who defines himself by an idea of heroism, and who is therefore available to be used by anyone who can frame their project as heroic. His stubborn refusal to think, to update, to accept information that contradicts his desired narrative of himself, drives much of the novel’s plot and some of its most frustrating scenes.

That frustration is the point. Abercrombie is not depicting Leo as stupid — he is depicting him as captured by an idea of himself that prevents him from exercising the intelligence he possesses. He is surrounded by people who are using his desire for glory to achieve their own ends, and he can see this, partially, and cannot act on what he sees because acting on it would require him to be something other than what he wants to be.

His arc in The Trouble with Peace moves toward the catastrophe that The Wisdom of Crowds will deliver, and the craft of the middle volume is that the catastrophe feels entirely earned — not as a twist but as the logical destination of choices that have been consistently characterised across two novels.

The Age of Madness and the First Law World’s History

The Age of Madness trilogy is set roughly a generation after the original First Law trilogy. The Union that the first trilogy examined as a corrupt but functioning state is now in the early stages of industrial transformation, and the transformation is doing what it always does: concentrating wealth, displacing traditional workers, creating new centres of power that operate outside the old hierarchies, and generating the resentment that fuels both reform movements and their more violent alternatives.

Abercrombie has said in interviews that he was interested in the First Law world’s equivalent of the nineteenth century: the moment when the logic of capitalism becomes visible in its social consequences. What distinguishes his treatment from historical allegory is that the First Law world’s specific history — the events of the original trilogy, the power structures those events produced and reinforced — shapes what industrial revolution means in this context. The Union that is failing its people in the Age of Madness is the same Union that failed them in the First Law trilogy, and the failure has the same structural causes.

Why the Middle Volume Succeeds

Middle volumes of trilogies fail for a predictable reason: they have no independent purpose except to bridge beginning and end. The Trouble with Peace avoids this by being, in a specific sense, the trilogy’s most fully achieved volume. It is the novel where Abercrombie’s political intelligence is most completely on display, where the mechanics of catastrophe are most precisely rendered, and where the characters — Leo, Savine, Rikke, Orso — reach the points of no return that make the third volume feel necessary rather than obligatory.

The ending is genuinely devastating, which is the highest compliment a middle volume can receive: it leaves the reader in a position that demands resolution while being complete enough on its own terms to feel like a novel rather than a transition.