It's a game of Trolls and Dwarfs where the player
must take both sides to win ...
It's the noise a troll club makes when crushing
in a dwarf skull, or when a dwarfish axe cleaves
a trollish cranium ...
It's the unsettling sound of history about
to repeat itself ... THUD!
It's the most extraordinary, outrageous,
provocative, insightful, and keenly cutting flight
of fancy yet from Discworld's incomparable
supreme creator ... Terry Pratchett
Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch admits
he may not be the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer --
he might not even be a spoon. But he's dogged and honest
and he'll be damned if he lets anyone disturb his city's
always-tentative peace -- and that includes a rabble-
rousing dwarf from the sticks (or deep beneath them) who's
been stirring up big trouble on the eve of the anniversary
of one of Discworld's most infamous historical events.
Centuries earlier, in a gods-forsaken hellhole called Koom
Valley, a horde of trolls met a division of dwarfs in
bloody combat. Though nobody's quite sure why they fought
or who actually won, hundreds of years on each species
still bears the cultural scars, and one views the other
with simmering animosity and distrust. Lately, an
influential dwarf, Grag Hamcrusher, has been fomenting
unrest among Ankh-Morpork's more diminutive citizens with
incendiary speeches. And it doesn't help matters when the
pint-size provocateur is discovered beaten to death ...
with a troll club lying conveniently nearby.
Vimes knows the well-being of his smoldering city depends
on his ability to solve the Hamcrusher homicide without
delay. (Vimes's secondmost-pressing responsibility, in
fact, next to being home every evening at six sharp to read
Where's My Cow? to Young Sam.) Whatever it takes to unstick
this very sticky situation, Vimes will do it -- even
tolerate having a vampire in the Watch. But there's more
than one corpse waiting for him in the eerie, summoning
darkness of the vast, labyrinthine mine network the dwarfs
have been excavating in secret beneath Ankh-Morpork's
streets. A deadly puzzle is pulling Sam Vimes deep into the
muck and mire of superstition, hatred, and fear -- and
perhaps all the way to Koom Valley itself.
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