Inkthinker - glad to see another person who is reading the stuff I am. I personally found the ending to LAST ARGUMENT to be very defeatist. It was actually my least fav. of the 3 (though the Logan sections were full of win). The 2nd one was my fav.
All of Ninefinger's story was epic win, but that's part of why I didn't care for the last book. It's not that I didn't think the ending, especially Logan's, wasn't appropriate, it's just that I don't care for flat story arcs, and in the end I felt like that's what Abercrombie delivered with the third book. Even characters who advanced in plot or personality often had that growth undermined by the events of the third book. Call it "dark" or "defeatist", all I know is that after I set down
Last Argument of Kings I felt like someone drowned my puppy.
It's still an awesome series of books. The Bloody Nine is probably the best "barbarian" character I've ever read, and I've read a few. I like Abercrombie's personalities and I love his action scenes. That's why I'm torn over it, 'cause I feel like I should recommend it to friends, but it's SO depressing at the end.
Best Served Cold is coming out soon, and while I know it's not part of the trilogy
per se, it's set in the same world and in a time period only a few months or years after the events of the trilogy, so I'm hoping for better closure of SOME sort for the original cast. If it ends even a little better and I don't feel like he wrote it just to mollify squeaky wheels like myself, I'll put it back up as one of my favorite new series. There's a sample chapter on his site, and it's pretty good stuff. This book starts out dark as hell, so I'm hoping the way out is the way up.