The Grim Guys Review: A Third Series the World Did Not Need

I stopped this one after a single book, and the reason is not that book one is unusually bad. It is that book one arrives with something like twenty-three volumes already behind it, in a world that has not gone anywhere, and it is being sold as a fresh start.

Let me give it the fairness it is owed first. If you handed me this book with no context, no knowledge of Ugland, and no memory of the twenty-odd that came before it, I think I would have called it passable. The prose is at his usual level, which is to say fine. The setup functions. There is nothing incompetent in it.

It does not arrive without context, and pretending otherwise would be a kind of dishonesty.

The same men with different names

The two leads think and act like Ugland's existing protagonists.

I can see what he is reaching for. Two men, a partnership, distinct enough to strike sparks off each other and carry a long series between them. The obvious model is Erik and Rugrat in The Ten Realms, which is a series with its own problems but got that particular thing right. It is a good target. He misses it.

The miss has a specific shape, and it is worth naming because it is a writing problem rather than a taste problem. The leads overlap in how they reason. Faced with a situation, they arrive at similar conclusions by similar routes, in similar voices. Ugland appears to notice this, because he then distinguishes them by assigning flaws.

The flaws do not differentiate. They just make the characters less likable. You finish a scene able to tell which one is which only by which unpleasant trait is on display, and slightly less interested in both than you were going in. Adding a defect is not the same as writing a person, and this is the third time in the catalog I have watched the substitution get made.

The good thing, delivered badly

The kingdom is interesting.

I want to be clear that this is real praise. Mahrduhm has been referenced across the other books for years as the opposing power in the world, and getting inside it should have been the reward for having read that far. A different culture, a different structure, the other side of a conflict that has been background texture for years. That is a genuine idea and I was ready to enjoy it.

Then it is delivered through an elaborate side quest.

That is the structure that has been hollowing out the other two series for their entire run, and here it is again, wrapped around the single most promising element the shared world has produced in years. If you have watched the needle move less with every book, and you are then handed a new series whose new territory is dispensed through the exact mechanism responsible for the slowdown, the effect is not disappointment. It is closer to being taunted.

Infuriating is the word I keep coming back to, and I have tried to find a milder one.

Where it lands

F. I use this tier rarely and I want to justify it rather than assign it.

It is not F because the writing collapses, because it does not. It is F because of what the book is for. A new series in a shared world is a promise that there is more story here and that it is worth your time. Twenty-three books of evidence say the opposite, and this volume adds no counter-evidence. It moves the world's plot precisely nowhere, it introduces leads I could not distinguish from the ones I already had, and it spends its one good idea on a side quest.

Read alone, it might have been a C. It is not alone, it never will be, and grading it as though it were would be a review of a book that does not exist.

Verdict

Not Worth the Credit. If you want the full argument about why none of these threads pay off, the shared-world piece covers all twenty-three books that preceded this one. If you want the corner of Ugland's catalog that does work, it is the early Bad Guys run.