Winter Warriors

2.5 stars. Following the successful colonization of a far-off land, the Drenai army and its heroes head home, but things go totally whack when demons start infecting people and turning them totally nutty. The heroes must protect the pregnant queen and get her to safety before the demons close in, or else her child could be the third king to be sacrificed, the final ingredient to a demon spell for world domination.

I really wanted to love this book. It starts off great with Gemmell's trademark verge-of-retirement heroes, but it reads like a rough draft. The characters are great, the plot is interesting if a little cliche. The last 100 pages in particular are really exciting, and have some of Gemmell's trademark twists and turns and impossible situations turning out for the best. But in the end it just seems kind of haphazardly written. There's a lot of tell, stuff happening off-the-page, from the wrong points of view, and there are revelations bordering on deus ex machina. There is a really interesting plot underneath all of what's going on, but you don't really get what's actually happening until very late in the book. Again, this makes it seem like it was an early draft, and later revisions would have put that information further up at the front.

Lending credence to this argument, there are no chapters in the second half of the book. It's just one big chapter. The whole affair reminds me a bit of Cujo by Stephen King, a book written by a great author completely fried on cocaine. I'm not surmising what led to this unsatisfactory performance from Gemmell, but this one was just a little tough to get through. Luckily it's not very long.

Not Gemmell's fault, but I also had the feeling that I'd missed quite a bit by reading this Drenai book first. Several reviewers have said that you can read them in any order, but I definitely felt like I was watching Home Alone 2 without seeing the first one.