Author: Kevin J Anderson
Publisher: Simply Audio
Rating: WORTHY!
Ably read by James Langton.
This is the story of a trio of con-men who claim to slay dragons but really run elaborate schemes with a crocodile head at the end of them along with the bald-faced assertion that this is the dead dragon, and the hope that the victims of the scam have neither seen nor heard of crocodiles. This is when they're not splintering wood to sell pieces of the true cross, or delivering skulls retrieved from graveyards and passing them off as the trewe skulle of some saint or other. They've even been known to sell several skulls of the same saint in the same village, passing them off as representative of said saint at different periods in his life!
If you're wanting standard trope or clichéd fantasy, then don't come here. You won't like it. If you do, however, want an hilarious tale told with a silver tongue stowed inside a cheeky cheek, and with rib-tickling modern observations on medieval life, then this is definitely the place you want to visit. There's a lot of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in this novel, but here it's much more dry, subdued, and restrained.
The audio book was eminently listenable, for which I am eternally grateful since a bad reading can destroy even a really good and engrossing novel. Once in a while the cadence was a little irritating, but most of the time I didn't notice it because the novel was so entertaining.
The story really gets going when a real dragon appears, and the startling Princess Affonyl - a delightfully strong female character - takes her fate powerfully into her own hands.
