Everyone in this is a horrible, horrible bastard. It's very compelling, don't get me wrong, but if you're going to read it, you need a high tolerance for people having lives which suck and continue to suck and will never stop sucking and are ground into the mud, over and over again.

Second book of how a world entirely populated by the grubby and the nasty and the horrid goes. There is quite a lot of potentially very cool backstory going on which we don't find out much about. I think I'd like to read the Wikipedia articles about the sons of Euz.

Final book in trilogy of horrible people doing horrible things to one another. I was quite surprised by who the bad guy actually turned out to be; maybe everyone else knew it was coming (pardon, I'm avoiding spoilers). I've said to a few people looking for who "the good guys" are in A Song of Ice and Fire that there really aren't any good guys and any bad guys; there are just guys. In this, there are bad guys, and that's all there are, but one of them is considerably badder than most.