I picked up this book to see what happened next, after the strange finish to David Niall Wilson's "The Grail's Covenant" trilogy. The two series were meant to connect together, one taking place in the Dark Ages and the other picking up in the late 20th century. Unfortunately, the connection between the two turned out to be weakly contrived, haphazard, very forced, and lacking in any sense of meaning or depth. In fact, any hope of an intriguing connection between the two was immediately destroyed at the beginning of the first book of Fleming's trilogy, in an infuriatingly pointless destructive act of what appeared to be a consummate literary clod.

From this initiating travesty of writing, the entire first book -- having shat all over everything that was good in Wilson's prequel trilogy -- dove face-first into tepidly written, weakly plotted "professional fanfic" targeting the roleplaying game market with pointlessly commercialized banality and unremarkable characterizations devoid of reasons to give a crap whether they lived or died, with the possible exception of just wanting them to die because of what Fleming did with the implicit promise left by Wilson's clearly superior work. ( )