Author: Robert Jackson Bennett
Publisher: Crown Publishing
Rating: WARTY!
This story is a sequel to a non-existent story which probably would have been better than this one. In the past, we're told, there were gods, which were defeated, and the city which had been powerful, Bulikov, is now for all practical purposes, a ghetto. A professor is murdered there and an investigator, a woman named Shara (who would have been more aptly named Mary Sue), hailing from the conquering nation of Saypur, takes it upon herself to try and solve the murder. She's evidently so weak that she needs to have a boring caricature of a Viking, a lumbering giant named Sigrud, to take care of her. So immediately we have three cultures tossed into the mix like a bad recipe for a stew. None of this worked.
It's like the author tried to jam as many fantasy cultures into this as possible without a thought as to how - or even why - they might (or might not) fit together. None of the characters was introduced in a way which made them jump out and say "pay attention to me", so I had no vested interest in any of them. Indeed, despite the variety of cultures, there really was nothing to differentiate one character from another. There were frequent references to history which were really tedious because they were largely irrelevant to what was going on now - or at least if they had relevance, it certainly wasn't apparent to me in the part that I read.
I tried twice to get into this, but the story was so obscure, so slow, and so boring that I could not read past the first ten percent. Life is too short and there are far too many novels out there demanding attention, most of which will undoubtedly be better than this one, so where's my incentive to keep reading this? Exactly. I cannot recommend this novel.
