About this book
<p>It's a game of Trolls and Dwarfs where the player<br>must take both sides to win ...</p><p>It's the noise a troll club makes when crushing<br>in a dwarf skull, or when a dwarfish axe cleaves<br>a trollish cranium ...</p><p>It's the unsettling sound of history about<br>to repeat itself ... THUD!</p><p>It's the most extraordinary, outrageous,<br>provocative, insightful, and keenly cutting flight<br>of fancy yet from Discworld's incomparable<br>supreme creator ... Terry Pratchett</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>
About Unknown Author
Sir Terence David John Pratchett, OBE more commonly known as Terry Pratchett, was an English novelist, known for his frequently comical work in the fantasy genre. He is best-known for his popular and long-running Discworld series of comic fantasy novels. Pratchett's first novel, *The Carpet People*, was published in 1971, and since his first Discworld novel (*The Colour of Magic*) was published in 1983, he has written two books a year on average.
Pratchett was the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s, and as of December 2007 had sold more than 55 million books worldwide, with translations made into 36 languages.
He is currently the second most-read writer in the UK, and seventh most-read non-US author in the US. In 2001 he won the Carnegie Medal for his young adult novel *The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents*.
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