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Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
Another incredibly fast-paced adventure featuring Jon Shannow. This time, Mr Gemmell takes the Hancock/Von Daniken ideas, a fairly large presence in the last book, and turns it all the way up to 11. However, he also includes the Bermuda Triangle, a race of lizardmen, men turning into lions, mid-life crises, nuclear war, some timey-wimey-ness, more stuff about Atlantis, Biblical legends, as well as a primer on how to control a community through fear and gunplay.
Frankly, it should be a mess, but it's tightly controlled and you barely raise an eyebrow at each preposterous development as it comes into play because you're too damn busy wondering just how Shannow and his cohorts are going to get out out of their next mess.
The setting feels a lot more realistically constructed this time around, possibly because it builds sensibly on what was revealed in the last book, possibly also because Gemmell appears to have a tighter rein on his creativity and is becoming a much more disciplined writer: unlike several of his previous books, there are fewer storylines that feel underdeveloped (I wanted to read more about the lizardmen, but that's a different thing entirely). I did think that Sharazad was a little two-dimensional as a villain, but I had little else to complain about. Gemmell commits a series author's sin in that he assumes that the reader has read the previous books and doesn't need more than a couple of sentences reference to get up to speed: explaining Shannow and Pendarric's relationship as "He saved me when I was trapped on the Titanic in the middle of a desert by sending me a magic sword" sounds really cool but stretches credulity a little - hell, I've read the previous book and it sounds a little bit silly!
Great fun.