This book... This series... Maybe this author—I can't say for sure; I haven't read his other books—and editor... Whatever it is, they have some serious issues. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but prior to the first few chapters of this book, Baron Glass had never seen the Devil's Armor—it was Lukien who had been in its thrall at the end of The Eyes of God; yet, we have Baron Glass pondering it in the first few chapters here and Lukien never pays it any more heed. I'll set aside more minor things like one-eyed Lukien being able to see out of his other eye when, um, one is swollen shut. Huh.

Second, there are amazing amounts of grammatical and spelling errors throughout this book. Granted, it's over 700 pages of words, but there are certainly longer books that don't have typos. When I see something published, I don't necessarily expect the story itself to be pure gold, but I do expect the highest degree of perfection from the technical aspects of writing.

All that being said, this is a truly compelling story. The back of the books says it well enough, so I won't bother with a summary—but know that in spite of the first two long paragraphs with their aggravations, I still can sit for hours on end reading because the plot is just that good and the characters are just that interesting. Marco builds his characters on a more realistic premise than most fantasy authors seem to—they are flawed in various ways, and they all inhabit a gray area concerning their morals. There are certainly some you root for in the end, but just as there is no black and white in the real world, there's remarkably little of it in this book. The "bad guys" are vulnerable and feeling; the "good guys" have malicious and selfish tendencies.

It's a really rewarding read in the end. Many authors who write a series of tomes get bogged down in sixteen different storylines and a cast of characters that has to be documented for twenty pages, but here, everything is streamlined, everything is focused on the task at hand, and while it may or may not fold up neatly into a nice little package at the end (we'll see how that goes!), either way, it's a really great story, and that's what matters. ( )

Another interesting book from author John Marco. This is clearly epic fantasy, a complicated tapestry of threads following a large cast of characters, and yet the story moves along quickly and never loses focus.

Marco’s characterization is interesting. He writes about people who embody a gamut of world views and ethical systems. These are people who face difficult ethical decisions, and Marco does a good job of helping us feel for their various dilemmas. This is not a story with clear-cut good guys and bad guys. Instead he gives us characters who are motivated by good intentions, and yet end up causing harm in one way or another, despite their efforts to do what seems right (given their own personal moral and ethical view of the world. anyway). In some ways these characters are very simple, almost like something out of a morality play or fable.

The book is well plotted, with a few nice surprises. The battles may be few and far between, but when they happen they are delivered with the same compelling clarity and an almost visceral impact that has marked Marco’s writing since his very first book, The Jackal of Nar.

If I had a complaint it would be the lack of a satisfying conclusion to the story. Clearly this is not a book that you can read without moving on to book 3 of the Lukien trilogy, the recently released The Sword of Angels. ( )