This series was very promising, and to be fair, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it while I was reading it. His protagonists were all very well developed, and are very interesting and complex. This was the greatest strength of the series.

Abercrombie gives the series an amoral noir feel, which is feels pretty novel in epic fantasy, but it's not as original as he seems to think it is.

In some places, this series feels like it was written by someone who hasn't read very much fantasy, and doesn't know what is and is not cliched.

The powerful, manipulative wizard figure felt completely tacked on to me. He doesn't fit in with the rest of the world at all, and seems to have been included just so that the story would be fantasy (rather than historical adventure). It was also a completely boring and uninteresting twist on the Merlin/Gandalf archetype.

It annoyed me every time he got "screen-time" and it doubly annoyed me when he robbed the much more interesting mortal characters of their agency.

But for broad swaths of this novel, this blight on my enjoyment was nowhere to be found. My attachment to the other protagonists (only one of whom could even remotely be called a "hero") and the dark and grim story telling was compelling enough for me to get through the series in scant weeks, despite my hatred for the all-powerful wizard mentor cliche.