Before They Are Hanged

Well that was a surprise. Almost all trilogies have “middling” second books whose job is to fill in some gaps and lay the grounds for the third one, and you forgive its lack of plot. However I so much more enjoyed this to the first book. It might not be empirically true but I got the feeling that the number of characters settled down and Abercrombie did I fine job in fleshing all of them out and the three distinct threads(North, East and South) were clear and easy to follow (a map would help but there are some fan ones online. Immediately jumped into the third one.