Aubrey the Malformed's page

Dave Gross seems to have the surest touch of the writers for the PF novels line. He writes well, does good action, and the pacing is generally good (although I'd say this is a bit less pacy than Prince of Wolves). The structure is similar to the last novel, in that Radovan, Jegarre (and the dog, in this instance) all get separated and have individual adventures before meeting up for the finale. (I'm not sure if this will really work for yet another novel, though.) A fun and entertaining read, and frankly pretty damn good in the otherwise often lamentable field of RPG tie-in novels.

I'm surprised by some of the negative comments about the shifting of the 1st person narrative between characters: he did it in the last novel, he hardly invented the idea so it really shouldn't be mind-blowingly unusual to deal with, and it simply isn't true to suggest it is hard to work out who is talking - it takes about a sentence into each chapter. It maybe requires the reader to think a teeny bit, but that should be a good thing, right?

The present tense didn't bother me - the Thraxas novels, which are good, are all written in the present tense and it's fine once you get used to it. But the author didn't really seem to know how to use it properly, so he failed to give the dynamic feeling he was trying to give.

Anyway, that would be forgivable if the story was OK, but it isn't. Like other readers, I failed to finish this and it is the only PF novel so far I gave up on. The characters are colourless and the story drags, so in the end I couldn't be bothered to find out what happened to them. In the present or any other tense.