Joe Abercrombie's got balls. It's something about his attitude, the way he stares down cliche and then casually twists it to his own, brutal ends. It's something about the way he refuses to allow any of his characters a fairy-tale happy ending, or how he manages to build a world out of sarcasm, to turn cynicism into tone. I, along with everybody else, have been commenting on this compulsion to overturn the staid tropes of fantasy fiction since his First Law trilogy began. But it is only with Last Argument of Kings, Book Three of The First Law, that he brings his vicious story to a crashing finale. 

Mr. Abercrombie had a lot of ground left to cover, plotwise, at the end of Book Two; the main characters were essentially in position for the climax and conclusion of their respective adventures, but the final battles had yet to be played out. Before They Are Hanged represented a fruitless quest for a questionable goal, leaving the point-of-view characters somewhat purposeless at journey's end, literally back at square one. They had arrived home from a dreadful vacation, only to find that their problems were there waiting for them. 

In Hanged the author led the story into choppy seas; with Kings he delivers a brilliant maelstrom that none of his characters come out of in one piece. Loose ends are mercilessly chopped, conflicts resolved with bloody finality, and, often, grand hopes crushed in the jaws of brutal realism.
 
(A note to the wary: beyond here, there be spoilers.)